by Simon Black
Sovereign Man
Over 4,000 years ago during Sargon the Great’s reign of the Akkadian Empire, it took 8 units of silver to buy one unit of gold.
This was a time long before coins. It would be thousands of years before the Lydians in modern day Turkey would invent gold coins as a form of money.
Back in the Akkadian Empire, gold and silver were still used as a medium of exchange.
But the prices of goods and services were based on the weight of metal, and typically denominated in a unit called a ‘shekel’, about 8.33 grams.