Ancient Greece
The first metal used as a currency was silver more than 4,000 years ago, when silver ingots were used in trade. During the heyday of the Athenian empire, the city's silver tetradrachm was the first coin to achieve "international standard" status in Mediterranean trade.
Read more about this topic: Silver Standard
Famous quotes containing the words ancient greece, ancient and/or greece:
“In my Pantheon, Pan still reigns in his pristine glory, with his ruddy face, his flowing beard, and his shaggy body, his pipe and his crook, his nymph Echo, and his chosen daughter Iambe; for the great god Pan is not dead, as was rumored. No god ever dies. Perhaps of all the gods of New England and of ancient Greece, I am most constant at his shrine.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Here is the ancient floor,
Footworn and hollowed and thin
Here was the former door
Where the dead feet walked in.”
—Thomas Hardy (1840–1928)
“It was modesty that invented the word “philosopher” in Greece and left the magnificent overweening presumption in calling oneself wise to the actors of the spirit—the modesty of such monsters of pride and sovereignty as Pythagoras, as Plato.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)