For hundreds of thousands of years, human civilizations tended to barter for goods, trading shells and precious stones for food and other important commodities. For the first evidence of money as currency, we need to go back 5,000 years to where modern-day Iraq now sits, to find ‘the shekel’. Though this was the first form of currency, it was not money as we know and understand it today. It actually represented a certain weight of barley, a kind of plant, equivalent to gold or silver. Eventually, the shekel became a coin currency in its own right. In much the same way, Britain’s currency is called ‘the pound’, because it was originally equivalent to a pound of silver. The ancient Greeks and Romans used gold and silver coins as currency, with the Latin ‘denarius’ ultimately giving birth to ‘dinar’ in various countries including Jordan and Algeria, and providing the ‘d’ that served as an abbreviation for the British penny before decimalization in 1971. It also gives us the word for money in Spanish and Portuguese – ‘dinero’ and ‘dinhero’. The first ever banknotes were issued in 7th-century China, though it took another 1,000 years before the idea of paper money was adopted in Europe, by Sweden’s Stockholms Banco in 1661.