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Silver Hasn’t Been This Cheap In 5,000 Years Of Human History

More than 4,000 years ago, the city of Kanesh was quickly becoming an important commercial trading hub within the ancient Assyrian Empire. Kanesh was located in the dead center of modern-day Turkey, so it was perfectly situated on the route between the Mediterranean and the Black Sea, and between Europe and Asia Minor. As a result, Kanesh became a popular trading post. And merchants, scribes, and moneylenders from all over the Assyrian Empire traveled there to profit from the boom in copper, tin, and textiles.

 

What’s extraordinary about this period of history is how many records remain from those day-to-day transactions. The Assyrians borrowed the writing system from ancient Mesopotamia and routinely chiseled their commercial trades on clay ‘cuneiform’ tablets. Tens of thousands of these tablets have been discovered by modern archaeologists, so we have an incredible amount of detail about ancient financial transactions. For example, one tablet on display at the Met in New York City documents the terms of a loan that originated in Kanesh some time in the 19th century BC.

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