In Another Land

[rain_gryphon]

Alyattes, King of Lydia (father of the legendary Croesus), is generally agreed to be the first king to mint actual coins, around 600 BC or so. Prior to that, there was currency of a sort, in the form of bronze axe heads, knife blades, bracelets, etc, made to a standard weight. For smaller transactions, you had to either barter, or weigh out some metal. Alyattes (or more likely, some long-forgotten technician) was the first to come up with the idea of very small pieces of weighed metal, stamped with pictures (so you couldn't trim off the edges). As one might expect, this proved of enormous benefit for shopkeepers. The ability to make easy micropayments also led to a huge boom in prostitution. When Herodotus went to see his tomb a few hundred years later, there was an engraving listing the people who'd contributed to build it. Prostitutes and shopkeepers were the two most prominent classes.

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In Manila, there's a "KKK Restaurant".

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An interesting article on the economic dislocation caused by the abolition of slavery in the West Indies.