346 economy: Egypt built a smoky fire to indicate their arrival and withdrew to a safe distance The locals came down to the beach, inspected the goods, and then left behind a quantity of gold that they thought represented a fair price The Carthaginians returned, and if they thought the price was fair, they took the gold and left; if not, they again withdrew and the locals could leave behind a greater quantity of gold if they wished This process continued until a price had been reached, the Carthaginians accepted the gold and left, and the locals carried off the goods The Carthaginian economy was a command economy, directed by the ruling dynasty in Carthage This dynasty was an oligarchy of prominent families Transactions were taxed, creating a royal treasury used to finance the military and numerous public works projects MONEY The development of money in Africa, as well as in other parts of the world, was closely related to taxation Money, as opposed to coins and currency, is an abstraction Money is defined in a number of ways: a medium of exchange, a store of value, a standard of value, a unit of account, and a means of payment In modern life people store value by opening bank accounts or contributing to retirement accounts In this way they can store resources for the future, when they can convert savings into groceries and other commodities But while the modern world thinks of money as coins and currency, virtually anything can serve as money, as long as others accept it as money, it cannot be easily counterfeited, it is relatively scarce, and it holds its value over time In ancient Africa tangible goods were the primary form of money Objects were priced relative to one another, so that a certain quantity of salt, for example, was regarded as equivalent in value to a certain amount of gold African traders who formed the marketplace for goods were adept at determining these relative values They served as middlemen who exchanged the commodities and collected a surplus that was their payment for brokering the transaction Similarly, a cow could serve all the purposes of money, and objects were “priced” relative to cattle In some cultures a person could pay for something with a cow and receive “change” in the form of a sheep or goat or perhaps some other commodity, such as a sheepskin The English word pecuniary, referring to money, comes from the Latin word pecus, meaning “cattle,” and the English words cattle, chattel (any goods or tangible property), and capital (in the economic sense of assets) all have the same linguistic origin Interestingly, the modern world has similar financial instruments While cattle are not used much as money, certain intangible things are In 1997 the pop music star David Bowie introduced “Bowie bonds,” a form of money that gave owners of the bonds a claim on future royalties from his music While the form has changed, the basic concept of providing something of value in exchange for something else, rather than exchanging coins and currency, is little different from the practices of ancient Africa The problem was that the taxing authorities could use only so much salt or so many heads of cattle Accordingly, systems of coinage developed primarily as a way to pay taxes and not as a way to facilitate barter, as is commonly believed Secondarily, coinage was a more convenient way to pay such obligations as fines, bride-prices, and tribute to foreign conquerors; the word pay comes from the Latin pacere, meaning to “appease” or “make peace with.” In ancient Africa coins were not minted out of precious metals for these purposes The most common form of “coinage” was the cowrie shell, a brightly colored shell from warm-water gastropods (mollusks, for example) that had value because they were brightly colored and thus were used in luxury goods such as jewelry At various times, though, other similar items were used as coinage, including feathers, metal tools, and ivory The later Carthaginians minted coins and also used gold as a means of payment EGYPT BY PANAGIOTIS I M KOUSOULIS The inner structure of the ancient Egyptian state was based on three factors: economy, religion, and political ideology These factors were closely connected in a variety of modes and expressions The pharaoh was regarded as the earthly manifestation of the divine and the guarantor of the fertility of the land and the fecundity of the stock The Egyptian lands were the exclusive property of the king, who divided them into agricultural domains and placed them under the control of the temple or political administration Although there was no word equivalent to economy in the vocabulary of the ancient Egyptians and nor was there a planned economic framework, the transition from a nomadic to an economic culture, the unification of Upper (South) and Lower (North) Egypt, and the formation of the political state and administration gradually led to the development and institutionalization of a working economic system Economic transactions and practices are documented in a variety of sources Even from the inauguration of Egyptian political history there is evidence, from the end of the fourth and the beginning of the third millennium b.c.e., of the tripartite nature of Egyptian society (religious, political, economic) and the role of economy in it For example, on the mace head (a ceremonial staff ) of the mythological king Scorpion (Dynasty 0, ca 3050 b.c.e.) the central scenes depict the king’s efforts to render the land agriculturally valuable through the exploitation of certain techniques (seeding, harvest, tree plantings) and ritual actions (presentations to divinities) Sources of economic information can be categorized into two principal groups The first group includes monumental inscriptions and pictorial representations that cover almost two millennia, from the Old Kingdom through the New Kingdom (ca 2575–1070 b.c.e.) The evidence from the Old and Middle Kingdoms is scanty and becomes much more