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[QUOTE]Originally posted by Myra Wysinger: [QB] [b]The Social Origins of Money: The Case of Egypt[/b] John F. Henry Department of Economics California State University, Sacramento [b]Abstract[/b] It is important to note that in Egypt (and this would accord with Mesopotamia and other areas) money was developed in a non-market, non-exchange economy. While some economic historians and anthropologists of a neoclassical persuasion diligently speculate that the Egyptian economy [i]must[/i] have paralleled that with which we are now familiar, there is no evidence for exchange in the Old Kingdom. The Egyptians had no vocabulary for buying, selling, or even money; there was no conception of trading at a profit (Bleiberg, 1996, pp. 14, 23-4). It is very clear that there was no market in grains (Eyre, 1999, p. 53). [b]A market economy (of a sort) and the monetization of the economy, including the production of coins, had to wait until Greek domination[/b] (Bowman and Rogan, 1999, pp. 25-6). Moreover, there is no evidence of private property in land in the Old Kingdom (Ibid., p. 24). Egypt was not a monetary economy: production was not undertaken in order to "make money." But it certainly had money. And money was not a medium of exchange, but a social relationship. It was bound up with the transition from egalitarian to class society, the social requirement that the older tribal obligations had to be maintained in form though the substance of those obligations had now irrevocably been altered, and the funerary rituals that bound this class-fragmented society together. The ruling class, surrounding the semi-divine king, levied non-reciprocal obligations ("taxes") on the underlying population. These taxes had to be accounted for and a measure had to be developed to allow a reasonably systematic form of bookkeeping to maintain records of obligations and the extinguishing of those obligations. In Egypt, this unit of account was the [i]deben[/i], and it is important to note that the [i]deben[/i] was an arbitrary standard that rested on a particular weight. And this weight remained the same regardless of whether it referred to grain, copper, or silver. Money has no value in and of itself. It is not "the thing" that matters, but the ability of one section of the population to impose its standard on the majority, and the institutions through which that majority accepts the will of the minority. Money, then, as a unit of account, represents the class relations that developed in Egypt (and elsewhere), and class relations are social relations. [[URL=http://www.csus.edu/indiv/h/henryjf/PDFS/Egypt.PDF][b]Source[/b][/URL]] . [/QB][/QUOTE]
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