ABSTRACT
In Mesopotamia, several materials functioned as money: barley, lead, copper or bronze, tin, silver and gold. This chapter discusses the development of silver as money in the second and first millenniums bc up to the time of Alexander the Great. Trust in silver and protection of the value of silver was a main concern. Assyrian and Babylonian kings boasted that they collected huge amounts of booty and tribute, among which silver and gold were ubiquitous. The chapter discusses the abundant evidence from the Assyrian traders’ colony at Kanesh in southeast Anatolia; compares the use of silver in daily exchange in the Old Babylonian period and the Neo-Babylonian period, and pays attention to an exceptional stage in the development in between, the Kassite period, when gold replaced silver as the standard currency. The sources from Kassite Babylonia date mostly from the middle of the fourteenth to the middle of the twelfth century.
