Credit systems preceded the invention of coinage by thousands of years

the most shocking blow to the conventional version of economic history came with the translation, first of Egyptian hieroglyphics, and then of Mesopotamian cuneiform, which pushed back scholars’ knowledge of written history almost three millennia, from the time of Homer (circa 800 BC), where it had hovered in Smith’s time, to roughly 3500 BC.

What these texts revealed was that credit systems of exactly this sort actually preceded the invention of coinage by thousands of years.