For example most regions had a rural/ agrarian economy and could have used cattle horns. It would have represented their amount of cattle they had and therefore their actual wealth.
I think there is a small group of people in africa doing something like that with fish right now.
So why settle for metal coins?
In: Economics
Metal lasts long, is easy to carry, looks rich, sounds cool, cannot be easily duplicated as well. All these qualities contributed for metal being at the top of all other choices.
Precious metals are:
1. Durable. They don’t wear down much in coin form, only doing so very slowly.
2. Consistent. You can weigh one to know that it’s (more or less) real.
3. Difficult to fake. Can’t really *counterfeit* precious metals. Horns, on the other hand…
4. Easy to control in supply terms. Cattle horns can be made by people who aren’t the state.
5. Portable. Cattle horns are huge. Coins are small. Lots of coin is heavy, but that’s a problem for later.
6. Mostly useless for anything else other than aesthetic/cultural value before the advent of electronics. Horns have much more material value, risking currency *destruction*.
Horns grow back. You don’t want people to easily be able to reproduce your units of currency or you will get bunches of forgeries. Also distributing currency based on existing wealth makes no sense and misunderstands the entire concept of currency.
Metal is also easy to mold and shape while being somewhat difficult to replicate. If you want 1000 units of currency you really don’t want to be trying to carve horns or something. Instead stamping or molding metal coins makes way more sense.
ancient China Africa and India used Cowry shells because they were small, portable, durable and almost impossible to fake, cow horns are probably a bit too easy to obtain and too big. Simple metal currency like the middle eastern talents and celtic iron bars was attractive, valuable in small enough quantities, valuable in it’s own right, unlike, say, today’s paper money, and not easy to reproduce or fake. The later coins started as a certain weight of valuable metal of a decently consistent purity stamped with a mark to show that. Traditionally by Croesus of Lydia after the discovery of methods to seperate the gold and silver in electrum. Lots of people prefered the Cowry shells for a long time after.
The traditional “money metals” are extremely nonreactive, meaning your gold/silver/copper can sit exposed to oxygen for a long time without turning into a pile of rust.
Because metals are durable, they can be melted to be divided into smaller portions, but you need an infrastructure to melt metals into properly engraved coins so the local authority can control the supply (prevents counterfeit).
Gold/silver do not rust so it was thought their values would remain unchanged through time.
Horns aren’t always the same size, so it’s annoying to make sub-units (how do you sell for a tenth of a horn when all horns are of different sizes ?). They’re also cumbersome. You can’t increase or decrease the value of horns by changing their composition like you would with coins so it’s not very practical for making economic policies.
While it’s not impossible that people used horns as currency, it’s simply impractical compared to metal coins. For both the daily consumers and the authorities.
Even today, extracting metal ore is time-consuming and expensive. It is why metals have value.
One of the chief features of a physical currency is that it is easy for the mint to make, but hard for anyone else. And *if* anyone else does try to make it, being able to find and stop them is a great bonus.
Metal can be cast, which is great for mass manufacturing. And a cast can produce a super detailed (hard to copy) coin for the same effort as a simple coin. There is no equivalent mass scalable, “detail for free” method to shaping horn, except maybe branding/burning a design into it.
But then theres the other side of the issue: hard for the other guy to make. It is easy to make horn (grows on ~~trees~~ cattle), and a brand is also easy to copy. Metal, on the other hand, comes from a limited supply, requires special tools, and requires foundries. So again: easy to mint, but hard for others to make. Especially when you use special metals that aren’t used for much else; the mint can control the supply, so it’s even harder for anyone else to get it, to make forgeries. And if someone does get your special metal, or isn’t able to hide a big foundry, you can easily shut them down by taking the metal or breaking the foundry. Again, nothing like this exists for horns. Or pretty much any other ancient material.
And even with all this horns don’t “directly represent wealth.” They dont really represent number of cattle, because of balancing between steers and heifers. And cattle weren’t really used for wealth by everyone (and not at the same ‘scale’ among those that did). The other issue, more broadly, is that, in a large scale economy, money is most useful when its most abstract. If it’s too direct (like being literal fish or wheat or horns), then people will just focus on making “money” instead of actually being productive.
Gold, silver and copper are limited, durable and maleable enough to be mint, few other materials have these properties. There have been other things used as currency (cocoa beans) but usually you want something that doesn’t grow back or that gets used up
Some good answers here already, and if you’re really interested in this topic I highly recommend the book The Ascent of Money, or the equally-good mini-series.
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