Chapter III: Wealth

When dealing with the decorative transformation of artificial objects I referred (p. 78) to the large axes which are made in some of the islands in the archipelagoes off the south-east peninsula of New Guinea, and I pointed out how the desire for a reputation for wealth appears to have resulted in the production of a useless article, which took a great deal of time to fabricate.

Mr. H. Balfour[123] gives a parallel example in the case of “the development of our own civic and state maces. In these the end which was originally the handle end has now become the ‘clubbed’ end, through the small crown, which originally embellished the handle, having gradually developed into the enormous head so characteristic of the modern ceremonial mace; the two ends have changed places, and the sometime ‘business’ end is now the smaller.”

[123] H. Balfour, _The Evolution of Decorative Art_, 1893,
p. 73.

An analogous modification often occurs in votive objects. In prehistoric as well as in recent times objects are dedicated to certain shrines. Sometimes these may be objects in actual use, but frequently they are specially made, and in order to increase their value they are made in some more precious material or with more elaborate workmanship. For example, votive axes have the blade decorated and even often perforated, so that it comes to be an elegant fretwork axe-blade, artistic and valuable but utterly useless for material purposes. This has happened amongst many peoples and at various times.

But there is also a reverse process which operates in votive offerings, which may partly be due to the idea that the deities or powers to whom the offerings are made care more for the idea of offering than for the object offered, as at a later stage it was recognised that “to obey is better than sacrifice, and to hearken than the fat of rams” (1 Samuel xv. 22). It must, however, be confessed that another consideration has probably been operative, and that is economy, and it is conceivable that this motive has led to the reason being assigned that the idea of the gift, or the essence of the gift, was all that was necessary.

It is superfluous to detail many examples, as the following will suffice to illustrate this retrograde tendency. It was formerly a widely-spread custom to sacrifice attendants for the dead. “In the seventeenth century the practice is described as prevailing in Japan, where, on the death of a nobleman, from ten to thirty of his servants put themselves to death. The Japanese form of modern survival of such funeral sacrifices is the substitute for real men and animals, images of stone, or clay, or wood, placed by the corpse.[124] The ceremonies (in China) of providing sedan-bearers and an umbrella-bearer for the dead, and sending mounted horsemen to announce beforehand his arrival to the authorities of Hades, although these bearers and messengers are only made of paper and burnt, seem to represent survivals of a more murderous reality.”[125] The Chinese, too, on certain occasions make mock money in paper and then burn it as an offering.

[124] E. B. Taylor, _Primitive Culture_ (2nd ed.), 1873, p. 463.

[125] _Loc. cit._, p. 464.

Associated with wealth is the evolution of money. Money is essentially a symbol of value; coin is always of less intrinsic worth than its nominal value, and as money transactions increase the nominal value bears absolutely no relation to the real value, as in the case of paper money.

In some parts of British New Guinea we find at the present time a very interesting intermediate stage between mere barter and the evolution of money.

I have elsewhere[126] pointed out that there is no money in Torres Straits; but certain articles have acquired a generally recognised exchange value. Some of the objects necessitate a considerable amount of skilled labour; others, such as certain shell ornaments, vary in value according to the size of the shell, although, of course, the labour in fabricating a small shell is very little less than that expended over a large one. I noticed that, as with our precious stones, a comparatively small increase in size greatly enhances the value. In the first case it is the labour that gives the value, in the second it is the rarity. Thus these objects cannot be regarded as money as they have an intrinsic value. Those most generally employed are the _dibidibi_, a round polished disc worn on the chest, and formed from the apex of a large cone shell (_Conus millepunctatus_); the _waiwi_ or _wauri_, a shell armlet formed of a transverse section of the same shell; a _wap_ or dugong harpoon, a long elegantly shaped instrument cut out of a tree; a canoe.

[126] A. C. Haddon, “The Ethnography of the Western Tribe of
Torres Straits,” _Jour. Anth. Inst._, xix., 1890.

A good _waiwi_, one which can be worn on the arm of a man, is a very valued possession, the exchange value is a canoe or a dugong harpoon. I gathered that ten or twelve _dibidibi_ are considered of equal value to any of the above. The ornaments vary in size and finish, and the value varies correspondingly, thus no table of equable exchange can be drawn up.

A wife was formerly rated at the highest unit of exchange, her value being a canoe, or a _wap_, or a _waiwi_.

Macgillivray[127] states that in 1849 an iron knife or a glass bottle (which, when broken into fragments form so many knives) was considered a sufficient price for a wife. Now the natives usually give trade articles to their prospective parents-in-law. My friend Maino, the chief of Tud, informed me that he paid for his wife, who came from the mainland of New Guinea, a camphor-wood chest containing seven bolts (_i.e._, pieces) of calico, one dozen shirts, one dozen singlets (jerseys), one dozen trousers, one dozen handkerchiefs, two dozen tomahawks, one pound of tobacco, one long fish spear, two fishing lines, one dozen hooks, and two pearl shells, and he finished up by saying, “By golly, he too dear!” If the above price was actually paid, there was some foundation for his exclamation. Once when he sold me something he particularly demanded a tomahawk in exchange, as he had to give one to his mother-in-law to “pay” for his last baby, and he did too. It appears that babies have to be paid for as well.

[127] _Voyage of the “Rattlesnake,”_ 1852.

At the opposite end of British New Guinea, Sir William MacGregor informs us that at Pannaet (Deboyne Island), in the Louisiades, the canoes for which this island is famous are cut out with adzes of hoop-iron, but “they sell the canoes when made at from ten to fifty stone axes. They do not use the stone axe as a tool in this part of the country, but it still represents the standard of currency in great transactions such as the purchase of a canoe, or a pig, or in obtaining a wife. The natives always carefully explain that, as concerns the wife, the stone axes are not given as a payment for her, but as a present to the father of the girl. Steel tomahawks will, however, now be accepted, at least in some cases, in payment of a canoe, and no doubt the days of the currency of the stone axe for these and all other purposes are numbered” (July 1890).[128] In Misima (St. Aignan Island) also “they have entered the iron age, and appear to have entirely given up the use of the stone axe except as a medium for purchasing wives” (October 1888).[129]

[128] _Annual Report of British New Guinea_, C.A. 1, 1892.
p. 66.

[129] _Further Correspondence respecting New Guinea_, 1890, C.
5883, p. 251.

The evolution of the money symbol is a very interesting history, and I would refer those who would like to inquire further into it to the masterly work by Professor Ridgeway.[130] In the following brief sketch of this question I draw largely from that book.

[130] W. Ridgeway, _The Origin of Metallic Currency and Weight
Standards_, 1892.

Among the Bahnars of Annam, who border on Laos, “everything,” says M. Aymonier, “is by barter, hence all objects of general use have a known relationship; if we know the unit, all the rest is easy.” After enumerating certain exchange values, he continues, “1 _muk_ = 10 _mats_, that is to say, ten of those hoes which are manufactured by the Cedans, and which are employed by all the savages of this region as their agricultural implement. The hoe is the smallest amount used by the Bahnars. It is worth 10 centimes in European goods, and is made of iron.”[131]

[131] _Loc. cit._, p. 23.

“The Chinese likewise used hoes as money; but in the course of time the hoe became a true currency, and little hoes were employed as coins in some parts of China” (_tsin_, agricultural implements).[132]

[132] _Loc. cit._, p. 22.

At Ras-el-Fyk, in Dafour, the hoe also serves as currency,[133] and in West Africa “axes serve as currency; these are too small to be really employed as an implement, but are doubtless the survival of a period not long past when real axes served as money.”[134]

[133] _Loc. cit._, p. 45.

[134] _Loc. cit._, p. 40.

At the time when the Chinese made their great invasion into South-Eastern Asia (214 B.C.), they still were employing a bronze currency under the form of knives, which were 135 millimetres (5⅖ ins.) in length, bearing on the blade the character _Minh_, and finished with a ring at the end of the handle for stringing them. Under the ninth dynasty (479-501 A.D.), they used knives of the same form and metal, but 180 mm. (7⅕ ins.) in length, furnished with a large ring at the end of the handle and inscribed with the characters _Tsy Ku’-u Hoa_. Next the form of the knife was modified, the handle disappeared, and the ring was attached directly to the blade; but now, as weight was regarded of importance, its thickness was increased to preserve the full amount of metal, and the ring became a flat round plate pierced with a hole for the string.[135] Later on these knives became really a conventional currency,[136] and for convenience the blade was got rid of, and all that was now left of the original knife was the ring in the shape of a round plate pierced with a square hole. This is a brief history of the _sapec_ (more commonly known to us as _cash_), the only native coin of China, and which is found everywhere from Malaysia to Japan.[137]

[135] J. Silvestre, “Notes pour servir à la recherche et au
classement des monnaies et des médailles de Annam et de la
Cochin-Chine Française,” _Excursions et Reconnaissances_, No.
15 (1883), p. 395.

[136] W. S. Ament, “The Ancient Coinage of China,” _American
Journ. Archæol._, iv., 1888, p. 284, Pls. XII., XIII.

[137] H. C. Millies, _Recherches sur les Monnaies des Indigènes
de l’Archipel Indien et de la Péninsule Malaie_, 1871.

“Among the fishermen who dwelt along the shores of the Indian Ocean, from the Persian Gulf to the southern shores of Hindustan, Ceylon, and the Maldive Islands, it would appear that the fish-hook, to them the most important of all implements, passed as currency. In the course of time it became a true money, just as did the hoe in China. It still for a time retained its ancient form, but gradually became degraded into a single piece of double wire. These _larins_, made both of silver and bronze, were in use until the beginning of the last century, and bear legends in Arabic character. Had the process of degradation gone on without check, in course of time the double wire would probably have shrunk up into a bullet-shaped mass of metal, just as the Siamese silver coins are the outcome of a process of degradation from a piece of silver wire twisted into the form of a ring and doubled up, which probably originally formed some kind of ornament. The bullet-shaped _tical_ is now struck as a coin of European form. Just as, perhaps, the silver shells of Burmah became the multiple unit of a large number of real cowries, so the fish-hook made of real silver came into use as a multiple unit, when the bronze fish-hook had already become conventionalised into a true coin.”[138]

[138] W. Ridgeway, _The Origin of Metallic Currency and Weight
Standards_, 1892, p. 27.

“Every medium of exchange either has an actual marketable value, or represents something which either has, or formerly had, such a value just as a five-pound note represents five sovereigns, and the piece of stamped walrus skin, formerly employed by Russians in Alaska in paying the native trappers, represented roubles or blankets. This is an interesting parallel to the ancient tradition that the Carthaginians employed leather money” (p. 47).

To employ the language of geology, we have found evidence pointing to certain general laws of stratification. In Further Asia we have found a section which presents us with an almost complete series of strata, whilst in other places where we have been only able to observe two or three layers, we have nevertheless found that certain strata are invariably found superimposed upon others just as regularly as the coal seams are found lying over the carboniferous limestone. As soon as the primitive savage has conceived the idea of obtaining some article which he desires but does not possess, by giving in exchange to its owner something which the latter desires, the principle of money has been conceived.

Shells or necklaces of shells are found everywhere to be employed in the earliest stages. When some men began to make weapons of superior material, as for instance, axes of jade instead of common stone, such weapons naturally soon became media of exchange; when the ox and the sheep, the swine and the goat are tamed, large additions are made to the circulating media of the more advanced communities; then come the metals; the older ornaments of shells and implements of stone are replaced by those of gold (and much later by silver), and by weapons of bronze as in Asia and Europe, and by those of iron in Africa.

Copper and iron circulate either in the form of implements and weapons, such as the axes of West Africa, the hoes of the early Chinese and modern Bahnars, and the ancient Chinese knives, all of which remind us of the axes and half-axes in Homer; or in the form of rings and bracelets, like the manillas of West Africa and the ancient Irish fibulæ, or else in the form of plates or bars of metal, ready to be employed for the manufacture of such articles, as in the case of the iron bars of Laos, the iron discs of the Madis, and the brass rods of the Congo. Again, we are reminded of the mass of pig-iron which Achilles offered as a prize.

It is of the highest importance to observe that such pieces of copper and iron are not weighed, but are appraised by measurement. We shall find that it is only at a period long subsequent to the weighing of gold that the inferior metals are estimated by weight.

The custom of capturing wives, which prevails among the lowest savages, is succeeded by the custom of purchasing wives. The woman is only a chattel on the same footing as the cow or the sheep, and she is accordingly appraised in terms of the ordinary media of exchange employed in her community, whether it be in cows, horses, beads, skins, or blankets. Presently male captives are found useful both to tend flocks, and, as in the East and in the modern Soudan, to guard the harem.

With the discovery of gold, ornaments made at first out of the rough nuggets supersede other ornaments, and presently either such ornaments or portions of gold in plates or lumps are added to the list of media, and the same follows with the discovery of silver. Such ornaments or pieces of gold and silver are estimated in terms of cattle, and the standard unit of the bars or ingots naturally is adjusted to the unit by which it is appraised. Thus we find the Homeric talent, the silver bar of Annam, the Irish _unga_ all equated to the cow, and the Welsh _libra_, Anglo-Saxon _libra_, similarly equated to the slave.

With the discovery of the art of weaving, cloths of a definite size everywhere become a medium, as the silk cloth of ancient China, the woollen cloths of the old Norsemen, the _toukkiyeh_ of the Soudan, and the blanket of North America. This fact once more recalls Homer and makes us believe that the robes and blankets and coverlets which Priam brought along with the talents of gold to be the ransom of Hector’s body, all had a definite place in the Homeric monetary system.

“We have seen the Siamese piece of twisted silver wire passing into a coin of European style, and the Chinese bronze knife ending by becoming _cash_, just as the Homeric talent of gold appears, in weight at least, as the gold stater of historical times. Thus in every point the analogy between what we find in the Homeric Poems and in modern barbarous communities seems complete.

“We may therefore with some confidence assume that we are at liberty to fill up the gaps in the strata of Greek monetary history which lie between Homer and the beginning of coined money on the analogy of the corresponding strata in other regions. This assumption, resting on a broad basis of induction and confirmed by a good deal of evidence special to Greece and Italy, will be found to explain the origin, not only of weight standards in those countries, but of the types on the oldest coins, such as the cow’s head of Samos, the tunny fish of Olbia and Cyzicus, the axe of Tenedos, the tortoise of Aegina, the shield of Bœotia, and the silphium of Cyrene” (pp. 49, 50).

Professor Ridgeway’s view is that while mythological and religious subjects do occur on Greek coins, it can be shown that certain coins, even in historical times, were regarded as the representations of the objects of barter of more primitive times.

The tunny fish continually passes in vast shoals through the sea of Marmora from the Black Sea to the Mediterranean. A representation of this fish appears invariably on the electrum coins of Cyzicus. “We know that the articles which form the staple commodities of a community in the age of barter virtually form its money. In a city like Cyzicus, whose citizens depended for their wealth on their fisheries and trade, rather than on flocks and herds and agriculture, the tunny fish singly or in certain defined numbers, as by the score or hundred and the like, would naturally form a chief monetary unit, just as the stock-fish (dried cod) were employed in mediæval Iceland. Are we not then justified in considering the tunny fish, which forms the invariable adjunct of the coins of Cyzicus, as an indication that these coins superseded a primitive system in which the tunny formed a monetary unit, just as the kettle and pot countermarks on the coins of Crete point back to the days when real kettles formed the chief medium of exchange?

“But far stronger evidence is at hand to show that the tunny fish was used as a monetary unit in some parts of Hellas. The city of Olbia, which lay on the north shore of the Black Sea, was a Milesian colony, and was the chief Greek emporium in this region. There are bronze coins of this city made in the shape of fishes and inscribed ΘΥ, which has been identified as the abbreviation of θύννος, _tunny_. When we recall the Chinese bronze cowries, the Burmese silver shells, the silver fish-hooks of the Indian Ocean, etc., we are constrained to believe that in those coins of Olbia, shaped like a fish, we have a distinct proof of the influence on the Greek mind of the same principle which has impelled other peoples to imitate in metal the older object of barter which a metal currency is replacing. The inhabitants of Olbia were largely intermixed with the surrounding barbarians, and may therefore have felt some difficulty in replacing their barter unit by a round piece of metal bearing merely the imprint of a fish, while the pure-blooded Greek of Cyzicus had no hesitation in mentally bridging the gulf between a real fish and a piece of metal merely stamped with a fish, and did not require the intermediate step of first shaping his metal unit into the form of a tunny.

The island of Tenedos, lying off the Troad, struck at a very early date silver coins bearing for device a double-headed axe. Pausanias, in the second century A.D., saw at Delphi axes dedicated by Periclytus of Tenedos. It is probable, according to Professor Ridgeway, that such double axes as those stamped on the coins of Tenedos formed part of the earliest Greek system of currency. The prizes offered in the funeral games of Patroclus are of course merely the usual objects of barter and currency, slavewomen, oxen, tripods, talents of gold, and the like. “But he (Achilles) set for the archers dark iron, and he set down ten axes and ten half-axes;”[139] that is, ten double and ten single-headed axes. That such axes were evidently an important article in Tenedos is proved by the dedication at Delphi, and may not the axe on their coins represent the local unit of an earlier epoch?

[139] “Ten double-headed axes he set and ten single,” in the
translation by E. Meyers. _The Iliad of Homer_, xxiii. 850
(Macmillan & Co.), 1883.

The “tortoise” on the coins of Aegina has been mythologised as an emblem of Aphrodite, but the connection is not very intimate. According to a fragment of Ephorus, the Aeginetans took to commerce on account of the barrenness of their island. But they must have had something to give in exchange to the people before they could have developed a carrying trade, and Professor Ridgeway suggests that the tortoise on the coins of Aegina simply indicates that the old monetary unit of that island was the shell of the turtle (“tortoise-shell”), which was considerably larger, and therefore more valuable for making bowls than that of the land or mountain tortoise. The earliest coins represent a turtle, for the feet are flippers quite distinct from the legs of the later tortoises; also the thirteen plates of the dorsal shield, or carapace, are not so distinct in the turtle as in the tortoise, and in the older coins these plates are not represented. The earliest coins, too, have the incuse on the reverse divided into eight triangular compartments, which may indicate the eight plates of the ventral shield, or plastron, of all these animals.

The same line of argument applies to the Bœotian shield, which has been confidently pronounced to be a sacred emblem, but which we must now regard as a numismatic symbol of a real shield. On the reverse of these coins the incuse forms a rude =X=, bounded by a circle of dots, which probably represents the back of the shield, as the frame of an ox-hide shield consists of a circular rod with two crossbars.

“The idea of making the incuse represent the other side of the object given in relief on the obverse seems to be just the stage between a complete representation of the object, as in the tunny of Olbia, and that evinced by the early coins of Magna Græcia, on which the reverse gives in the incuse exactly the same form as that in relief on the obverse.”

The silphium plant of Cyrene, which yielded a salubrious but somewhat unpleasant medicine, has also been held to have a mythological symbolism, and without any evidence it has been foisted on to the hero Aristacus, “the protector of the corn-field and the vine and all growing crops, and bees and flocks and shepherds, and the averter of the scorching blasts of the Sahara.” “It seems far more reasonable to treat it on the same principle as the others just discussed. The silphium formed the most important article produced in that region, and it is perfectly in accordance with all analogy that certain quantities of this plant, and of the juice extracted from it, should be employed as money. At the present moment tea is so employed on the borders of Tibet and China, and raw cotton in Darfur.”

Professor Ridgeway argues that the same holds good for representations of cattle on coins—the image of the cow or the ox indicates that the gold piece so marked is a substitute for that animal.

These researches of Professor Ridgeway’s have thrown a new light on some of the images on Greek coins. He has transferred the symbolism of this class of coinage from the domain of religion to that of merchandise—from god to mammon.[140]

[140] Prof. D’Arcy W. Thompson, jun., has published a paper
(“On Bird and Beast in Ancient Symbolism,” _Trans. Roy. Soc.
Edinb._, xxxviii. pt.i., 1895, p. 179), in which he combats
Prof. Ridgeway’s theory, as being foreign to all we know of
ancient symbolism. “We must see fallacy in any theory which
treats as nascent and primitive the civilisation of a period of
exalted poetry, the offspring of ages of antecedent culture;
which sees but a small advance on recent barbarism in ways of
life simple in some respects, but rich in developed art and
stored with refined tradition; that looks only for the ways
and habits and thoughts of primitive man in races supported
by a background of philosophical and scientific culture of an
unfathomed, and may be unfathomable, antiquity. Behind early
Hellenic civilisation was all the wisdom of Egypt and the East,
and the first Greeks of whom we have knowledge looked upon the
old Heaven and the old Earth not with the half-open, wondering
eyes of wakening intelligence, but with perceptions trained
in an ancient inheritance of accumulated learning. “I print
this extract, as I consider that D’Arcy Thompson’s reminder is
needed in the present search after origins. With regard to the
point at issue, it appears to me that both may be right. Some
of the representations on Greek coins may have the significance
which Ridgeway ascribes to them, while others may bear the
interpretation given by D’Arcy Thompson, whose theory I shall
refer to later.