To: long-gone who wrote (92205 ) 12/27/2002 1:57:14 AM From: E. Charters Respond to As our story has wound its way from golden palaces and religious icons, from Bezants to Dinars, from golden halls to golden tribute, and finally to the dumb barter of gold fin slabs of salt in darkest Africa, a disturbing question comes to the surface: Where is value? For the Europeans, the Byzantines, and the Arabs, gold was the magical focal point of their material desires. Not so for the Africans. To the Africans toiling for gold but starving for salt, the salt standard was a force far more powerful and durable than anything that the gold standard stood for in the sophisticated civilizations everywhere else on the globe. What must those poor diggers have thought of the funny people from the north country who swapped inestimable salt for stuff whose only role on earth was to give men pride and pleasure by letting them see its lustre? what is money? In a currency and coinless society, where structures of trade are not universally accepted, then gold, silver and gems are the only trade items sufficiently compact to act as standards. They could not leave wood, iron, or food as trade, and many other arficats were hard to value, or suffered from saturation, so gold would have to suffice. And to say gold had no use in their society was perhaps naive. It was a corrosion proof jewelry item of great beauty, and detector of some poisons when used in chalices. Is use in trade was without question all across Asia and Europe. In that it was almost universally used by man throughout the world, whether contacted by trade or not, shows the esteem in which the metal was held intrinsically.
