Debt: The First 5000 Years - autonomous learning

226 DEBT
to say; it was removed from the temples and houses of the rich and
placed in the hands of ordinary people, was broken into tinier pieces,
and began to be used in everyday transactions.
How Israeli Classicist David Schaps provides the most plausible
suggestion: most of it was stolen. This was a period of generalized warfare,
and it is in the nature of war that precious things are plundered.
Soldiers who plunder may indeed go first for the women, the
alcoholic drinks, or the food, but they will also be looking
around for things of value that are easily portable. A long-term
standing army will tend to accumulate many things that are
valuable and portable-and the most valuable and portable
items are precious metals and precious stones. It may well have
been the protracted wars among the states of these areas that
first produced a large population of people with precious metal
in their possession and a need for everyday necessities . . .
Where there are people who want to buy there will be people
willing to sell, as innumerable tracts on black markets,
drug dealing, and prostitution point out . . . The constant
warfare of the archaic age of Greece, of the Janapadas of India,
of the Warring States of China, was a powerful impetus
for the development of market trade, and in particular for
market trade based on the exchange of precious metal, usually
in small amounts. If plunder brought precious metal into the
hands of the soldiers, the market will have spread it through
the population.9
Now, one might object: but surely, war and plunder were nothing
new. The Homeric epics, for instance, show a well-nigh obsessive
interest in the division of the spoils. True, but what the Axial Age also
saw-again, equally in China, India, and the Aegean-was the rise of
a new kind of army, made up not of aristocratic warriors and their
retainers, but trained professionals. The period when the Greeks began
to use coinage, for instance, was also the period when they developed
their famous phalanx tactics, which required constant drill and training
of the hoplite soldiers. The results were so extraordinarily effective that
Greek mercenaries were soon being sought after from Egypt to Crimea.
But unlike the Homeric retainers, who could simply be ignored, an
army of trained mercenaries needs to be rewarded in some meaningful
way. One could perhaps provide them all with livestock, but livestock
are hard to transport; or with promissory notes, but these would be