Interesting to get sight of this – but troubling that  the author thinks:  “many academic collections…...strike a discordant note as chapters…... diverge from the overall aim of the text.”

Is picking an “overall aim” a good way to go about telling history?

It crossed my mind that the 2018 volume “Money, Currency and Crisis”  (eds Spec Leeuwen) was in part Elliot’s “discordant” target – since that indeed seemed to break up into warring factions – but then again, perhaps that’s a price to be paid for enrolling eminent scholars? 

Anyhow, in case others have missed it - this is a punt for work by a historian in the aforementioned  2018 volume and elsewhere – Kristin Kleber – regarding texts dealing with pre-coinage Babylonian money.  It seems to this reader to hint at three fascinating possibilities

1)  “Silver” in ANE text might often refer not to physical silver by weight – but rather to a unit of exchange which has already parted company with physical silver – at a much inflated in value

2)   Transactional gold in general looks to be in c. 50% pure electrum.  This many centuries before the Lydian coinage.  Thus a whole library of speculation about fiscal intentions of Gyges and Co might be off the mark.

3) Most importantly, there was only one major Babylonian switch away from a silver standard to a gold standard, during the “Kassite” period, thus as a precursor to the widespread “Bronze Age Collapse”.  Those sticking to the core hard historical facts underlying much monetary history will surely bring to mind that the collapse of the ancient world in the West followed on from the adoption of a Roman gold standard in 309.  That the (near?) collapse of the medieval world followed from the launch of the gold florin in 1252.

When such a triple harmony goes unnoticed it ought perhaps to alert us to the potential costs of adopting “overall aims”

Robert Tye, York, UK

https://independent.academia.edu/RobertTye