Part 1 of the Primitive/Pre-Crypto Epic of Human History
Humans invented the first coins in the seventh century B.C.E. During it's first fifty years, coinage was made of electrum. These coins were either Lydian or Greek (that is, by Greeks living near Lydia). But electrum isn't that important. Not only because electrum soon yields to gold and silver coins in Lydia and silver coins in Greece, but instead, because it is the Greeks and not the Lydians who disseminate the new, catacylsmic technology of money.
But then why are the early historic Greeks of the seventh and sixth centuries B.C.E. those who first embrace and suffer from the emergence of money?