Hacked silver

Medieval hacked silver in the Museum of Hamburg History

Hacked silver is pre-coinage money in the form of crushed silver objects such as jewelry, coins , bars or small metal sheets. The commercial value was crushed, weighed and exchanged according to the metal value. For this purpose, some artistically valuable works were shredded and reduced to their pure metal value.

Similar currencies existed as chopping money or weighing money in the form of chopped up objects made of other metals such as gold or the alloy bronze .

history

Hack silver was already found in ancient Assyria and in trade between Egypt and Greece and the Middle East in the 6th to 4th centuries BC. Chr. Use.

A large number of hacked silver finds exist north of the Alps , which apparently date to the Roman Empire and the Migration Period . In the early Middle Ages , imported Arab coins were also crushed until local coinage became established .

In the 6th to the end of the 10th century AD , crushed coins and dishes were increasingly used as hacked silver throughout Northern Europe, including the British Isles , but especially in the Baltic Sea region (see Harrogate depository ). The occurrence of hacked silver shows a clear boundary along the Elbe . Neither in the west nor in the south of the river has so far been found any deposits containing hacked silver.

In parts of East Asia , hacked silver survived as a currency into the 20th century .

British silver hoard

• Cuerdale deposit found
• Penrith deposit found
• Skaill hoard
• Hoard of Traprain Law
• Vale of York Hoard

See also

• Chunks of casting
• Viking Age coin finds in the Baltic region
• Sachsenpfennig: name of the pfennig type (for the use of hacked silver by the Vikings)
• Hoard from Schaprode

literature

• Emil Bahrfeldt: The hack silver find from Gralow. A contribution to clarifying the Otto Adelheid question. 1896.
• Ernst Friedel (Ed.): The Hacksilberfunde. Outstanding art and antiquity items from the Märkisches Provincial Museum in Berlin 1. Berlin 1896.
• Main topic hacked silver. In: Archeology in Germany . No. 3, 1998, p. 12 ff.
• Birgitta Hårdh: Hack  silver. In: Reallexikon der Germanischen Altertumskunde (RGA). 2nd Edition. Volume 13, Walter de Gruyter, Berlin / New York 1999, ISBN 3-11-016315-2 , pp. 256-261.
• Fraser Hunter, Kenneth Painter: Hacksilber in the Late Roman and Early Medieval world - economics, frontier politics and imperial legacies. In: Nico Roymans, Stijn Heeren, Wim de Clercq (eds.): Social Dynamics in the Northwest Frontiers of the Late Roman Empire. Beyond Decline and Transformation (= Amsterdam Archaeological Studies. Volume 26). Amsterdam University Press, Amsterdam 2017, ISBN 978-94-6298-360-1 , pp. 81-96.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Heinz Fengler, Gerhard Gierow, Willy Unger: Transpress lexicon numismatics. Berlin 1976, p. 173.