What is the Deep Impact of Gold

Few naturally occurring substances have had nearly universal value among ancient and modern societies as gold. We often think of gold as something decorative or worn. However, in the ancient and modern worlds, gold was also the standard in which economies and value of other objects were measured by. In effect, gold helped structure and continues to help structure economies around the world today.

How Gold Became Important for Economies

Gold has been found in a variety of ancient societies in the New and Old Worlds. In almost all these contexts, gold was often buried with high status individual, indicating its value to ancient elites and leaders. This was true for prehistoric as well as historic societies. While gold was valued as a high status object, as societies began to form established governments and kingship, starting in Egypt and Mesopotamia, gold began to take an important value for trade. Initially, the trade was because of demand by elites. However, the value of gold also was in the fact it was not a perishable material. It was one of the few substances that was nearly universally valued, was easily transportable, and was not perishable. Societies in Mesopotamia and Egypt began to see its worth as a safeguard against fluctuations of other important commodities, with grain being the most important one. Silver also played a similar role in societies, where silver was often combined with gold to create electrum.

Another aspect of gold was that it began to be seen as a substance given by the gods, as its purity and shiny luster made it seen as a divine substance. By the 3rd millennium BCE, most likely spanning the Near East and the Indus, gold was used to make statues of gods. One aspect affecting gold was the fact that it was not evenly dispersed. Regions south of the 1st and 2nd cataract in the Nile soon became among the most important sources of gold that Egypt heavily exploited in the 3rd millennium BCE. The security that gold offered as well as its association with the gods increasingly made many objects, including luxury goods such as other precious stones or metals, valued relative to gold.