Ancient Egyptian Money system
Sources for the study of the use of money in Egypt consists of documents of the temple, biographies and other archaeological data. Currency began to be used by the Egyptians as the Greco-Roman period. For most, the ancient Egyptians were never conceptualized the use of money.
Ancient Egyptian Barter SystemThe Egyptian economy has been characterized by the system of barter goods were bought and sold . Payments were made in the form of rations of cereals, meat and fabric. The standard base salary of ten loaves of bread and one third to two full jugs of beer per day.
Egypt was basically an agrarian culture, the exchange of goods was across the grain and commodities. Later, the calculation has been done in terms of weight metals such as copper or silver. Prices were recorded on some papyri that date for a period of 150 years during the 19th and 20th dynasties.
However, there are many problems associated with the interpretation of these documents. Many of these texts were never intended to be read by anyone other than their owners, and were often not the work of professional scribes. However, from their scholars have identified four value units that have been used to price products, consisting of the debenture, Senyu, and the hin khar.
Ancient Egyptian Coins and Currency :-
Ancient Egyptian Deben
The deben is a measure of weight that was used for gold, silver, and most often copper. Debenture copper weighs between 90 and 91 grams.
Ancient Egyptian Senyu
A Senyu, perhaps meaning “piece” is a tape weight equal to about 7.6 grams. However, unlike other weights mentioned here, Senyu was exclusively a unit value calculation, and was not considered an actual unit of weight itself.
Ancient Egyptian Khar
A third unit is the value of NAM, a measurement of volume equal to 0.48 liters. The khar is a measure of the grain volume, or barley or other emmer, equal to 76.88 liters. The khar was most often found in a unit value for baskets, both because the volume of the basket was equal to its value and the baskets are relatively inexpensive.
Ancient Egyptian Money and Economy
Throughout Egyptian history, all these measures do not seem to exist at the same time. Before coins began circulating in ancient Egypt around 500 BC, there was a system of values based on the weight of the gold, silver and copper. Metal measured in units of weight known as deben (about 90 g) could be used to pay bills and trade.
Records of the eighteenth dynasty issue that often the real metal does not change hands, but it has been used to assess trade goods. Egypt had no readily available source of money, but the Egyptian word for money, hedj, has come to mean something close to “money.”
These metal ingots and rings date back to the fourteenth century BC and were found in el-Amarna. They give us the rare archaeological evidence of Egyptian system of money first. Complete ingots weigh about 3 deben and rings seem to be fractions of the debenture.
