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ter, the first portraits of rulers appeared on coins. (44).Firstly, it was made of bronze. More notable, it was not circular, but in the shape of a knife! The knife had a hole pierced in the handle so that it could be suspended (for example, from a string), and, like some Greek coins, it generally bore an inscription. Other shapes included keys or spades, but what they had in common was the pierced hole. It was probably around 250 B.C. that the first Chinese money we would recognize as coins appeared, and, subsequently, the famous Ming Mint produced a round coin with a square hole in it. This particular coin bore the inscription, “Knife of Ming,” but later the knife itself disappeared. It was from this coin that the famous “cash” developed. The Chinese word, “cash”, means “a small unit of currency.” Although Chinese coins often had inscriptions, they virtually never had portraits, or types of any kind, until the nineteenth century when were influenced by western models. (45). In the thirteenth century A.D. Marco Polo brought stories of such money to Europe, but the concept did not inspire the Europeans of his time. In fact, the true ancestors of modern paper money were the billets printed in France in 1716 by the Scottish financier, John Law. So the English word “cash” comes from a Chinese word, and the Spanish word billeted comes from a Scotsman in France. Money certainly seems to make the word go round! [A] Some were too heavy, some could not be divided into small enough parts (How much of a cow would you need to buy a piece of cheese?), some were not permanent enough. The solution was money as we know it, that is, money in the form of coins. [B] As for paper money, that was a Chinese invention, too. [C] Meanwhile, in
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