20

I'm talking about back when it was first starting to get discovered, like 2000 B.C. (roughly). Gold was being used for coins, jewellery and more. It was a very well known commodity and accepted generally everywhere. Gold by itself had no real world uses back then; so why did gold become so popular and valuable?

21
  • 6
    I don't think this is a history question. But gold is valuable because it is relatively non-reactive, non-corrosive, malleable, and importantly, uncommon enough to be rare but common enough to be used as currency - leading to people buying them as a store of value.
    – Semaphore
    Oct 17, 2014 at 15:27
  • 3
    @Semaphore do you propose any better site for this question? And is it really worth so much because it's non-corrosive and rare? Really is that the only reason? There must be some history behind it...
    – Chantola
    Oct 17, 2014 at 15:33
  • 8
    @Semaphore, I disagree: IMO this is a legitimate question on the history of currency.
    – Michael
    Oct 17, 2014 at 15:57
  • 3
    On principle I will downvote any question that references an unspecified period of history that is probably equal to more than half of human history. Why did gold have value WHEN? 1000bce? 100 BCE? 1950? What is "modern" in this context? The word is commonly used to refer to post WWII - are you seriously asserting that gold had no real world use till WWII? And what is a "real world" use? Semiconductors? Teeth? Catalyst? Medicine? How do you define that term?
    – MCW
    Oct 17, 2014 at 16:35
  • 3
    @TylerDurden I completely disagree, I don't see any better place for a historical question like this, and you don't provide any references either. You don't even say why it's off-topic.
    – Chantola
    Oct 17, 2014 at 22:33

4 Answers 4

15

The question is commonly asked (Google the question and you get 446,000,000 answers).

  1. BBC News has an excellent answer that mirrors my answer below, but in far more depth and with much less withering sarcasm. The summary is the last two sentences, " . . . to paraphrase Churchill, out of all the elements, gold makes the worst possible currency. Apart from all the others."

  2. Yahoo provides several answers that I think qualify as marginally profound. The answer chosen as "best" seems to rely on some assumptions that I don't think are explicit in the question or answer.

  3. Investopedia provides another answer that includes much of the BBC answer with an investment perspective. "It is abundant enough to create coins, but rare enough that not everyone can make them."

  4. Personal finance stack exchange provides another answer which mirror's OP's question "The answer is that other than a small number of applications (the approx. 10% of gold production that goes to 'industrial uses') gold does not have intrinsic value beyond being pretty and rare (and useful for making jewelry.)"

  5. Money stack exchange has another answer "Gold's value starts with the fact that its supply is steady and by nature its durable. " I'm not sure I agree that the facts support the conclusion, but I don't disagree. Second Aside: The question was edited while I was composing this answer. This is a poor answer and probably not worth revising to fit the new question; I think much of my answer is as relevant to the new as it was to the old

Gold is valuable because people want it. "Value" means wanted by people. To quote the early economic theorist William Shakespeare, ". . . there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so." Gold has no intrinsic value, but neither does anything else. All value is subjective; interesting value is collective (shared among a society) Different cultures have held different things to be valuable at different points in history. Shells, large stones, women named Helen with noses of a particular length, etc. I would infer that there is a social need for a shared notion of value, and that if there is nothing that fills that role, then we are compelled to invent it.

Since OP excluded modern industrial uses, gold has no rational value. The various articles I cite above point to some properties of gold that make it useful, but several of them also point to the fact that gold is beautiful. Beauty is subjective, but gold is pervasively perceived as beautiful. I cannot imagine any way to separate the portion of gold's value that derives from raw beauty from the portion that derives from cultural reasons

Gold is also the subject of a neurotic fixation for those with an irrational fear of fiat money. One of the diagnostic symptoms of this neurosis is that those suffering from the disease cannot be persuaded through the use of facts (indeed, they seem to detach further from reality in proportion to the persuasive value of evidence to which they are exposed.) Note: There was a time when the gold standard made more sense than the alternatives; there was also a time when it made perfect sense to calculate with Roman numerals. You can still do those things, but society recognizes that doing so is aberrant behavior.

  • Why is gold used as a currency? Convention. Even trivial research will reveal the necessary properties of currency, and gold fills the bill for most of history.

  • Why is gold used as a store of value? Gold has two crucial properties. The first is that it is relatively rare - common enough that most cultures understand it, but rare enough that the demand almost always exceeds supply. The second is that gold does not rust. Gold is incorruptible. These two things make it a useful, durable, persistent store of value. It will almost always be accepted, and it will not diminish under normal circumstances. As a bonus, it is easy to divide (an anti-pattern for Spartan money)

Aside: Obviously I'm having a cranky day, and my tongue is planted in my cheek. My intent is humor; let me know if I've crossed the line back into my characteristic "withering sarcasm".

6
  • 1
    For all the flack that the op was given, this is, itself, a really nice answer.
    – CGCampbell
    Oct 17, 2014 at 22:53
  • 1
    This is an incredibly thorough and complete answer. All my questions have been answered. Thank you for your answer, and the provided references, +1
    – Chantola
    Oct 18, 2014 at 2:36
  • 1
    This is a good example of a great answer to a lousy question.
    – Semaphore
    Oct 18, 2014 at 15:48
  • 1
    only little gold goes into industrial production precisely because it is so expensive (valuable). If it had no speculative value other than that linked to its practical use, it would be much cheaper, and believe me, i'd put it in every immaginable electric connection. Do you know how good a conductor gold (and even more silver) is? And it doesn't even oxidate. Besides, gold has other very useful physical properties (like rolling it out very thinly and its thermal conductivity is good too), which aren't used because gold isn't cost effective in practical use, because of its inflated value.
    – Matthaeus
    Oct 27, 2014 at 0:07
  • @Matthaeus Every imaginable connection? Not quite. Gold melts very easily, so a power connection will probably get ruined. Silver is the best conducting element from the standpoint of ohmic resistance, but it corrodes too easily. Gold does not. Probably best is a gold-silver alloy known as electrum: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrum , which interestingly enough was known and used in ancient times. It would make a good question what's the best ratio to use. Btw, copper has less ohmic resistance than gold, so maybe silver-copper is better (other than anticorrosion applications.)
    – DrZ214
    Jun 6, 2017 at 11:40
9

From a practicality perspective; Gold shared the same an early advantages that Copper did for developing societies. It can be worked by being beaten and by being cast, so the technology requirements to begin working with gold is lower than even bronze. In it's natural state gold is malleable and shiny, making it an obvious candidate for cultures and artists that are in early stages of developing trade-able goods.

Even crude experiments in metallurgy would reveal gold's resistance to tarnish and the ease with which it can be reworked.

It wouldn't have been until smelting and mining developed that gold would have been known to be scarce. (At one time gold would have been FAR more available than Iron). So scarcity is a secondary characteristic in terms of ancient value.

In terms of extended value throughout history we can argue that the Cultural and Industrial values are extensions that emerge naturally from it's workability and the ease of reaching high degrees of purity.

4
  • Copper is better for weapons & tools. Copper is also, IIRC, easier to alloy. I think comparing gold to iron is a false comparison.
    – MCW
    Oct 17, 2014 at 18:59
  • 1
    Copper is far better for weapons and tools. However the EASE of working (and alloying) copper and gold, and the technology level required to do so, would be identical for an ancient culture. Secondly it is a very true comparison to say that, to a primitive culture, a few handfuls of gold would have been both more AVAILABLE and more USABLE than tons of iron they were unable to extract. Even civilizations that show no signs of rudimentary iron working left behind examples of advanced goldworking. [I have no direct citation for this assertion, but would be shocked to see a contradiction] Oct 17, 2014 at 19:10
  • 1
    @H.R.Rambler Egyptians maybe? you should focus on them. Lots of gold to go around and not much iron (except some meteorites). Also they fabulously lost to the Hyksos, because bronze is cool but iron is cooler (second interim period). Before that they didn't have the knowledge to work iron (besides not having any to work).
    – Matthaeus
    Oct 27, 2014 at 0:19
  • Egypt was the primary example I was thinking of, but I left it unnamed because I didn't want to send myself on an enjoyable but time consuming citation hunt. Oct 27, 2014 at 0:35
6

To add to @Mark's answer, we may venture that in early times, gold was both rare and amenable to be crafted into jewels that thus displayed the wealth of their owner. As such, gold is a key to an elevated social status, making it highly desirable everywhere. Gold was not the first metal to serve in that role; e.g. some late neolithic tombs have yielded copper axes that were too small and soft to have been used for any purpose other than decorative.

A similar pattern was found among Aztecs, who valued Quetzal feathers a lot, especially since they could be obtained only from the most western areas of the Aztec influence zone; these provinces had to pay a yearly tribute of Quetzal feathers. Besides being somewhat pretty, the only use for Quetzal feathers in Tenochtitlan was to show that you could afford Quetzal feathers.

Quetzals live only in central America; gold can be found in many places, but always in small quantities and requiring a lot of work to extract. Marx remarked that gold is very appropriate for use as a currency, especially for hoarding, since it is very durable, compact, easy to store, amenable to essentially lossless division and reassembly, unlikely to lose its value over long period of times (since the influx from mining is small), and otherwise completely useless(*). Not many materials have all these properties, and gold has them everywhere it can be found. Furthermore, though hard to obtain, gold can still be mined and handled with rudimentary technology. This may go a long way towards explaining the universality of the value of gold.

This leads us to an historical theory of gold's value: when a society becomes technologically advanced enough to mine gold and use it to craft jewelry, gold quasi-automatically becomes a powerful marker of the owner's place in the society, thanks to its intrinsic qualities: durable (you can use it for continuous display for many years), compact (you can wear your wealth, contrary to, say, a herd of camels), recognizable (it is hard to make convincing fake gold),... only the richest can own gold jewels, and you want gold jewels because it makes you look rich(**). At a later time, when the notion of currency is invented, gold is then a likely candidate, strengthening its position as a repository of value.

(Marx, being himself, would not have accepted a theory of gold's value as a social status marker; in Marx's view, everything is a question of labour, so gold's value comes from the amount of labour that goes in its extraction and purification. But even this marxist theory brings us back to universality: everywhere on Earth, mining gold-rich ore and extracting the shiny metal from it requires a lot of efforts.)


(*) This is not entirely true. Nowadays, gold has some industrial uses, especially in electronics. Even in ancient times, gold was used for dentistry, as in this example found in an Egyptian mummy from around 2000 BC:

ancient Egyptian dentistry

(found on this page)

Nevertheless, these non-decorative uses of gold have always been a small minority, when considering the amount of involved metal.

(**) The underlying idea in all this is that people who want gold do not, actually, want the metal for itself, but for what it can bring to them. Prescott explains it vividly in The Conquest of Peru: when Pizarro and his companions ransom Atahualpa, their main motivation for such a craving of gold is to be able to come back to Spain as grandees, to gain access to the highest planes of the highly hierarchical Spanish society.

1
  • +1 for the gold in mummy teeth. I would like to add/expound something, tho. Precisely because gold had no industrial value...this makes it a good candidate for jewelry/ornaments/currency, because you lose no opportunity cost in doing so. On the other hand, something with industrial value, like copper, can also be currency since it's "inherently valuable." Almost anything can be valuable, but it makes sense to use the material that best matches opportunity cost. I think this is a major reason why gold became the "gold standard" in currency.
    – DrZ214
    Jun 6, 2017 at 11:52
1

I am going to suggest that its extreme heaviness was a major feature contributing to its value. If you sell something by weight then the heavier it is the easier a given weight is to carry especially if you want to conceal it. Of course, its rarity and physical qualities are major contributors also.

Your Answer

By clicking “Post Your Answer”, you agree to our terms of service and acknowledge that you have read and understand our privacy policy and code of conduct.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged or ask your own question.