NOW YOU KNOW

When you buy a pack of gum, you just reach into your pocket and pull out money. But early people didn’t have money as we know it. They swapped things such as cattle, cloth, salt and gold dust for goods they wanted. Historians think the first coins were made 2,600 years ago in Lydia, which is now western Turkey. Made of gold-silver mix, the coins, called staters, were bean-shaped. And they were a lot easier to handle than cattle as a medium of exchange.

Source: World Book Encyclopedia

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