Today everything that we need, we have to buy it with ‘money’. Yeah! We are talking about those coins and paper notes. But why do we need money at all? Did it exist in olden times? Let’s explore.

‘Barter’ or ‘give and take’ forms the basis of all trade in the world. You have to pay in some way for the things that you want to have. In olden times, there was no money but people still paid each other in kind. Like when someone wanted to buy some rice they would pay the other person in things like food grains, milk, animals, clothes, wood and many more useful items like that. But this system was not very convenient as many a times people didn’t have the exact thing the other person wanted in return. So now what?

Somewhere around 600 BC in Lydia, a kingdom in Anatolia (Turkey was at that time called ‘Anatolia’) system of coins was introduced. These coins were made by mixing silver and gold together. China and India also began to use the currency system around the same time. Slowly, this system became popular and people around the world started following it. Since then only the form of money has changed – from gold and silver coins to the use of paper notes in modern times.

Imagine if such a system had not been invented, candies wouldn’t have been so easy to buy!!