Coinage and the Tyranny of Fantasy ‘Gold’

“In particular, the notions I want to tackle are first how did ancient currency systems work in terms of value (what could you buy with how much) and then second how often were people likely to use physical currency at all? This is going to be a bit of a ‘fun one’ because while we’ll talk quite a bit about how money is used in historical societies, we are going to loop back around to fantasy settings at the end.”

This is good: “And, as you may have guessed, there are some problems with this: functionally no one used gold in any amount in every-day transactions in the ancient or medieval Mediterranean (or most other places!), because a gold coin at almost any size was such an enormous monetary unit as to be unsuited to most transactions.“