The barter origin story of money is a myth that still lingers in the public consciousness and even in our schools.

Neolithic and Bronze Age economies operated mainly on credit. Because of the time gap between planting and harvesting, few payments were made at the time of purchase. When Babylonians went to the local alehouse, they did not pay by carrying grain around in their pockets. They ran up a tab to be settled at harvest time on the threshing floor. The ale women who ran these “pubs” would then pay most of this grain to the palace for consignments advanced to them during the crop year. These payments were financial in character, not on-the-spot barter-type exchange.

As a means of payment, the early use of monetized grain and silver was mainly to settle such debts. This monetization was not physical; it was administrative and fiscal. The paradigmatic payments involved the palace or temples, which regulated the weights, measures and purity standards necessary for money to be accepted. Their accountants that developed money as an administrative tool for forward planning and resource allocation, and for transactions with the rest of the economy to collect land rent and assign values to trade consignments, which were paid in silver at the end of each seafaring or caravan cycle.

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Origin myths at odds with the historical record [namely, the barter myth] are the result of the conflict between vested interests and reformers over whether the monetary and credit system should be controlled by banks or by governments. Are credit and debt to be administered by laws favoring creditors, or should the prosperity of the indebted population at large be protected? The way in which economic writers answer this question turns out to be the key to their preference regarding the Barter or State Theories of the origins and character of money, credit and interest.

Perhaps a more palatable descriptor than “myth” would be “theory which is not supported by currently available evidence.” It’s hard to investigate pre-agrarian, preliterate societies, and even if you did, how relevant would that be to how literate agrarian societies like ours function?