Money.

It makes the world go round. Tails.

Today, we can use things like Venmo  and credit cards to pay for things. But for a long time, everyone’s  money pretty much looked like this. People have been making coins  since around the 7th century BCE.

Since then, they’ve been used nearly continuously in the West as currency. Sometimes, these ancient coins resurface. And even though we can’t use a Roman denarius or a Spanish piece-of-eight to pay for  a cup of coffee, this old money holds a treasure trove of information  for archeologists and historians.

So let’s dig through humanity’s coin collection and learn seven six things money  can teach us about the past. [♪INTRO] The most immediate thing you can learn from ancient coins is about coins themselves. I know. Very meta.

Coins are, obviously, just pieces  of stamped metal that we all agree are valuable. People today  instinctively connect coins with money.

Think: Scrooge McDuck diving  into a pool of gold coins. But there is nothing inherent  about stamped metal being money. Money is anything that people  exchange for goods and services. People have used lots of different things as money, like shells, beads, and even cigarettes.

So, why have so many people  made coins to use as this? Weirdly, we don’t know exactly  when people started using coins. So far, the oldest coins we’ve found were minted in modern-day Turkey around 600 BCE.

They were made of electrum, a combination of gold and silver, so they had plenty of value as-is. And the stamp on their surface  was the official seal of the state saying that it was  legit, and that seal also worked as a promise that the issuer would  back the value of the coin. More importantly, that stamp meant that the issuer would buy the coins back from whoever had them, giving that person credit on their  accounts, or an IOU, or something.

The whole metal-money idea took off, and soon, a bunch of the nation states of the eastern Mediterranean were doing it. Before long, coins were everywhere. And archaeologists can use them to infer some surprising things about the ancient past.

Like the state of the economy. Take this coin, kept at the  Worcester County Museum in the UK. It’s a Roman, or at least Roman-inspired, silver coin dating from the 1st century CE.

You’ll notice it has a hole punched  through it, and it’s not the only one. Somewhere around 60% of old Roman coins found outside the region of Kent  dating to the Anglo-Saxon period have been pierced or altered in some way. Why?

Well, some historians think  that after the Roman army left the islands, all their Roman money  became pretty much worthless. But even if nobody on the islands wanted to use them as money, they  were still nice to look at. So, instead of using them for barter, people used their shiny coins as decoration.

Turning coins into jewelry is a big sign that your economy isn’t using the metal coins as currency, and that you’ve shifted away  to something else entirely. But you can also see evidence of economic trouble in other Roman coins. For instance, there’s a Roman  dinarius from the 1st century BCE, minted during a tough moment for Rome.

The Republic was at war, in debt,  and at risk of going bankrupt. And researchers have found evidence of this crisis in the coins minted at the time. See, all these Roman coins were  supposed to be made of pure silver.

But it looks like by 87 BCE, the Roman mint was deliberately adding between  5-10% copper to the mix. This meant the coins literally weren’t worth what they had been a few years ago. Turns out inflation’s been a problem for a while.

But coins tell us a lot more  than the state of the economy. We can use them to gain  insight into what metals people had available to them, how  advanced their metallurgy was, and even where those metals were coming from. Take this silver tetradrachm from ancient Athens.

For a long time, researchers  had assumed that early Athenians got this metal from  silver mines in northern Greece, since they were right there, and it makes sense. Why get imported silver, when  you’ve got silver at home? Except, it looks like they didn’t use those mines.

Or at least, not in the beginning. A recent analysis of the tiny  levels of things like lead, zinc, and gold in some of the  oldest Athenian coins suggests that they were made from silver that was mined as far away as Spain, France, Romania, and Turkey. The Athenians were only able to  get control of local mines and start producing their own silver  around the time they started making their iconic owl coins,  meaning that early Athens would have had to import its way to influence.

And coins can even tell us  what metals weren’t around. Take this Spanish real dating  from between 1772 and 1825, found in Jamestown. You might be wondering what  Spanish money is doing in the burgeoning United States,  and no, it’s not pirates.

Turns out, when European  colonizers came to North America, they didn’t just bring smallpox  and a superiority complex. Because while what’s now the United States was rich in a lot of  resources, they didn’t have any precious metals for the early colonizers to mine. And when the U.

S. first became a country, there wasn’t any metal to use to make AmeriCoins. So without a way to make their own coins, people just used the money from other countries. That only changed in 1857, when  Congress banned the use of other money and declared the U.

S. Dollar  as the only legal tender in the U. S.

All I'm saying is we chould  have gone with AmeriCoins. It does roll off the tongue more than 'dollar'. Hey, speaking of government, let’s talk about what coins tell us  about both politics and propaganda.

Coins were almost always  made by people with power. And the images that powerful  people chose to stamp onto those coins can tell us about their  priorities, or even their fears. The first faces that went on  coins were, of course, the gods.

Who wouldn’t want a little deific  help with their business transactions? And for a while, it was only gods on currency. The first coin to have the  head of an actual person, rather than that of a god, was the  Persian commander Tissaphernes, who lived around 400 BCE.

These portraits of actual humans give us some idea of what powerful people  looked like back in the day. And also, what they were trying to accomplish. Take this denarius from the year 44 BCE.

Julius Caesar was the first living  Roman to put his head on a coin. This was a big power play,  since at the time it was really taboo to put the face of a mortal on coins. He then upped the stakes by putting  the words “Dictator for Life" on the coin.

Which was technically true, since he was a dictator for the rest of his life. But that victory lap may  have been a bit premature, since he was assassinated just days after his dictator-coin was minted. While this was probably as far from a lucky penny as anyone may ever get, he did set a precedent.

With the rise of the Roman Empire, emperors took to putting their heads on coins, which is a trend that other  monarchs continue to this day. And that’s great for archaeologists,  since it means that we know who was in charge of the  place when the coin was made. Like, there are four different rulers from the eighth century that we literally only know about because they showed up on Anglo-Saxon coins.

They can also show us shifting values. One of the best examples of  this is how French coins changed over the progression of the French Revolution. Coins from 1789, when the revolution  began, show a portrait of King Louis the 16th surrounded by the  words “King By the Grace of God.” When Louis was imprisoned in 1792, he still got to be on the coins,  since was technically the king.

But instead of bragging about  his divine right to rule, the coins were instead inscribed  with “The Nation, Law, and the King.” I imagine that the “in that order” part is silent. Louis was executed the following year, and French coin makers stopped putting the head of state onto their coins. At least, they did until Napoleon  seized power later that century, and then we’re back to faces on money.

I guess in a coin toss, Napoleon  would be choosing heads. If you’ve ever thrifted a cool jacket and found the previous owner’s spare change in the pocket, you might know something about this next one. Because, just like that  change tells you a bit about the last time the jacket was worn, archaeologists can use ancient coins to figure out how old a dig site might be.

Like, if one of the coins in that sick  jean jacket was a penny from 1987, you know that your lucky thrift find had to have been worn some time during or after 1987. And this works in the more distant past, too. For instance, there’s a trove of 22 coins that researchers recently found in tunnels near an ancient village in Galilee.

Full disclosure: At the time  we’re writing this script, this paper hasn’t been peer  reviewed, but the findings from their press releases are cool enough that  we want to talk about it anyway. Archeologists knew that the  Jewish people in the area would use these tunnels to hide when things got violent, especially during two noteworthy uprisings against the occupying Romans in  the first and second centuries CE, which didn’t really end well  for those the Jewish people. But it seems like people kept using those tunnels for centuries after those two losses.

We know this because those coins  were made in the 4th century CE, well after the two noteworthy uprisings. The existence of these coins  suggests that the tunnels were also being used during  the third and final Jewish revolt that started midway  through the 4th century CE. Jewish people could hide here, regroup, pray, all out of sight of  the occupying Roman military.

And oddly enough, using coins  to date sites can be even more accurate than other  methods, like carbon dating. That’s because carbon dating  is best suited to stuff that’s a lot older than coins,  so it doesn’t tend to work as well on material that’s  only a few hundred years old. You can get the century, just  about, but decades are harder.

But coins with dates on them can  help narrow that window down. Recently, archeologists working at an Inuit site in Quebec were able to use a coin to work out that the site was probably active  some time in the 1630s, but that’s just too young for carbon  dating alone to close the gap. Lucky for them, someone at the site way back then threw away a French coin showing  the head of Louis the 14th, which was minted between 1632 and 1634.

Although the Inuit who lived here  clearly didn’t think much of this coin, because the archeologists  literally found it in a trash heap. Guess they felt it wasn’t worth much. Kind of like how we think of pennies today.

And while using coins to date  sites can be really helpful, it’s not always foolproof. Case in point: the Maria Theresa Thaler. These Thaler coins were first  minted under the rule of Empress Maria Theresa of the Holy Roman Empire.

But over the years, they  became the currency-du-jour in many parts of the Middle  East and the horn of Africa. The Austrian mint continues to  make exact copies of this coin to this day, including the date  1780 and the Empress's headshot. So if you found Maria Theresa’s  face in your jacket pocket, you can be confident that the  jacket was worn after the year 1780.

But it might be hard to tell much more than that. Before we get to the next one, it’s time for us to earn a few coins of our own with a quick ad break. As a SciShow viewer, you probably love engaging with new ideas and learning  outside of a classroom.

Like with Brilliant! Brilliant helps you strengthen your math skills, with lessons in Quadratics  that show you how to factor, graph, and solve quadratic equations. And you’ll be actively  learning all this stuff because they’ve packed over 700  exercises into just 55 lessons.

You definitely won’t be falling  asleep in a lecture hall. After all, Brilliant is made  for everyone from age 10 to 110. To learn for free on Brilliant for a full 30 days, go to brilliant.org/scishow,  scan the QR code onscreen, or click on the link in the description.

They’re also giving you unlimited  daily access to everything on Brilliant with 20% off an  annual Premium subscription. Thank you to Brilliant for  supporting this SciShow video. Aside from telling the age of a dig site, coins are a great way to  look at ancient trade routes.

Since the ancient world didn’t  have those airport kiosks where you could exchange your currency, that meant travelers and merchants  ended up paying for goods using their own country’s money, even  when they were way over the border. For instance, archaeologists working  at a dig site in northwestern China uncovered Roman coins  from the 1st century CE, which means that ancient Rome  and China were connected through whatever series of trade networks  stretched across Eurasia. We’ve since learned that Romans  were obsessed with Chinese silk.

The two groups probably didn’t directly interact, but they were connected through  a series of interconnected trade routes stretching all across Eurasia, mainly to bring fancy fabric  to the European masses. What would you call that? Some sort of... silk road?

It turns out, lots of people  we don’t tend to think of as being connected were trading with one another. In the 1980s, archeologists in  Sweden discovered a hoard of Islamic coins at a Viking burial  site dating back to the 9th century, meaning they too were connected  through trade networks, whether direct or indirect. More recently, a study uncovered  a previously unknown trade network that ran through southeast  Asia in the 1st millennium.

The researchers looked at the similarities between almost 250 silver coins, found  in several different countries. They all shared certain religious motifs, like a rising sun, which made the researchers suspect they may have been connected. In fact, they were really  connected.

Two of the coins – one found in Bangladesh and the other in Myanmar – were probably made by the same  person, or at the very least, using the same die. Talk about your art reaching a wide audience. Our last example is one of the other worst things to bring up at a dinner party,  besides money and politics – Religion.

If you compare coins from Islamic  cultures and Christian ones, you might notice an odd difference. During the Middle Ages, most of  the coins from the Muslim world don’t have any images on them  whatsoever, just calligraphy. And we pretty much know exactly  when this became a trend.

In 696 CE, Caliph Abd al Malik,  fifth Caliph of the Islamic Empire, minted the first coin in hundreds of years that had no symbolic images on them whatsoever. One theory as to why he did  this was to separate his empire and its values from that of  the Christian Byzantine Empire. Byzantine coins often portrayed  the emperor du jour alongside Christian images, but not a lot of writing, since the people in the empire  spoke a lot of languages.

These new text-only Islamic  coins were a flex because they showed that Arabic had become a  uniting language for their empire, and that people who used the coins were literate. Which isn't to say that the Caliph didn’t want you to know he was in charge. The coins also said that he was “God’s Deputy,” so taking his face off the coins  wasn’t exactly about humility.

At least if your money  comes right out and says it, nobody needs to offer you  a penny for your thoughts. From spreading political messages  to making fancy decorations, there’s a lot that people have done  with coins throughout the centuries. And clearly, that’s been great for us today, since those coins give us so many insights into the people who made them.

Our quarters aren’t made of  silver, and our pesos aren’t gold. But that doesn’t mean they won’t  have value to future historians. Think about what our many different coins will tell people about what we valued and why.

But let’s be real. It’s mostly going  to be pennies. So, so many pennies. [♪OUTRO] It was tails!