Case Study: Origin of Money, its influence in and stabilisation of human civilisation
Money is what money does. Money is embedded in human history as the chameleon. From Ox, cowrie, silver, gold to minted coin, paper money, and now in the present avatar of digital money, bitcoin. It has changed too often its contour and usage. Keynes duly observed this behaviour : "Money is a far more ancient institution than we were taught to believe some few years ago. Its origins are lost in the mists when the ice was melting, and may well stretch back into the paradisaic intervals in human history of the inter-glacial periods, when the weather was delightful and the mind free to be fertile of new ideas in the Islands of the Hesperides or Atlantis or some Eden of Central Asia."1 The coinage evolved as a prelude to writing in the three regions of first human habitations, eg.,Lydia in far East, China and undivided India. Anthropologists and historians are divided in their opinion whether the origin and spread of coinage in each region is influenced by the others or were f