Realistic prices in primitive society

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Hypatia

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I'm writing about a bronze age society, and I want to be somewhat realistic. How much, for example, would someone expect to pay in silver for a good cow? A good meal? New sandals? A really strong slave?

...That last part may need explaining. My character needs a bodyguard for a dangerous journey, and she knows full well this guy only killed a man by accident during a brawl, and she feels sorry for him.

Anyways, I don't want to throw my readers out of the story by naming the price for two things in silver, thus showing their relative value, and having it be wildly inaccurate.
 

blacbird

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Most really primitive societies deal in barter. But, regardless, I think you can just make something up. Judas, after all, betrayed Jesus for thirty "pieces" of silver. We don't have a clue how much actual silver that was, other than by the implication that it was pretty good temptation.

caw
 

ClareGreen

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How much is silver worth? How much is gold worth? The stock market hasn't floated yet, and there's no-one to say 'a cow is worth two pigs, a pig is worth two sheep, a sheep is worth ten chickens'.

Bits of metal are only worth as much as people are willing to give you for them, much the same as bits of paper are only really worth as much as people are willing to give you for them. Money's nothing but an abstract concept, it has no real value other than what is agreed upon.

A slave in a place with lots of slaves won't cost you as much as he would if he's the only one on the market - and a lot will come down to how well your character bargains, if she bargains at all. She can walk away thinking she got a good deal, or knowing that she didn't, or the slave could chirp up and say 'He'd have parted with me for half that', and so on.
 

Maraxus

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So ... prices ... as blacbird says, currency is mostly a classical era invention = iron age. There were also first coins in ancient egypt but they were not widely used like a real currency.

And then, definitely if you go with calling your currency "Copper-Silver-Gold", the prices may vary depending on the availability of the metals. Note that for example the old greek coins were mostly silver, of a weigth going from 0.72 gram for an obol to about 434 gram for a mine. Googling this values, I just found, that they also had a copper "chalkoi", worth 1/8 of an obol. No idea, how heavy that was.

Anyway, the romans used gold Aureus of 8,19 g worth 25 Silver Denarii of 4,55 g. Each Denarius was worth worth 4 Sesterzes, which were massive 25 to 28 g Brass coins and each of those were worth two bronze Dupondien of same size. There were other coins, two, but those values give an idea of the relative values of the diffrent metals that time and area.


Now to the value. An Obol or a Sesterz seams to be around "one day living minimum".
You can roughly try to estimate how much "work" is involved in a certain item to asume the prices and how much of his time a person of a certain profession needs to work to live at the minimum.
One Aureus is mentioned as a monthly wage for a legionary, a Denarius as a daily wokers wage - all just aproximatly and now necessary at the same time, sadly.

Slaves ... *check* Wikipedia says, in old greek times, a slave was about 3 mines which is roughly "an aweful lot" while at the same time in Gaul you got a young slave for an amphora of wine (worth only a few Drachmae (=1/100 mine) at most).
The important factors should be:
-Health and looks
-Important skills (Literate slaves are worth a lot)
-being allready whiped into obidiance (a slave that potentially runs away at the first opportunity or picks up a fight against other slaves, when put into the mines is not worth that much)

So my overall impression is that a worker in an average job, reducing his needs to a minimum can save enough money to buy a minimum-cost slave in about a month, high quality slaves should cost about 100 times as much.
 

Dommo

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The big factor back in the bronze age, when looking at value, was in the immediate return a said item could bring.

A slave was worth something, because labor was always in high demand(remember these societies BARELY had the means to feed themselves and were insanely labor intensive), metals like copper or bronze were worth a lot because they were immediately useful.

That's why currency really didn't start to appear until societies got to the point where they started dealing with resources as commodities as opposed to looking at their immediate worth. That's where gold comes in. Gold wasn't really valuable outside of its beauty, but what it was useful for, was as a "placeholder" for barter.

Essentially gold became a sort of "medium" that could be used as a universal barter. The draw back to it, is that it doesn't have real inherent value(hence an ancient trader, would probably get a better deal buying a few slaves in exchange for a horse, rather than paying gold, there's always money lost in conversion). In a weird way money is a lot like energy. Whenever it changes hands some bit of its original value is lost.
 

Maraxus

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That's why currency really didn't start to appear until societies got to the point where they started dealing with resources as commodities as opposed to looking at their immediate worth. That's where gold comes in. Gold wasn't really valuable outside of its beauty, but what it was useful for, was as a "placeholder" for barter.
Agreed but here "bronze age" does not really say a lot. Old Mesopotamia, Babylon, Egypt were all stable and rich enough to support currency. The Mesoamerican civilizations used seashells and cacao beans, likewise in China the first shells were used as a pseudo-currency even before the bronze age and in the bronze age metal coins became even more common then in the west.

Essentially gold became a sort of "medium" that could be used as a universal barter. The draw back to it, is that it doesn't have real inherent value(hence an ancient trader, would probably get a better deal buying a few slaves in exchange for a horse, rather than paying gold, there's always money lost in conversion). In a weird way money is a lot like energy. Whenever it changes hands some bit of its original value is lost.
Now this part I don't understand. Why should it be "lost"? where does the value go? So, if the trader, instead of exchanging the slaves for horses would sell the horse for 5 gold and bought two slaves for it and then sold the slaves to someone else for 5 gold and brought another horse for this money, where does the "value" escape the system?
I'd even say, initially it's exactly the opposite: The a currency get's used, the more people begin to trust in this currency, the more it is worth. And once the Athenian Drachmae is generally accepted in whole Greece, it once again gets more valuable when the foreign exchange traders from Gaul and Thrace notice that they can take this coins from one trader, too and buy stuff with it from another one.

However, with rare metals, there is also another point, that is a bit more critical (compared to todays GNP-based currencies, not compared to shells): Namely the amount of new gold that gets into the system or leaves it. The downfall of the roman economy was partially due to the fact, that they made more and more money and got inflation. In the other direction, in the medieval times, the nobles started hoarding their gold (to bath in it like Dagobert Duck or something) and consequently, the gold coins left in the trade circulation became more valuable.
 
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Hypatia

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I was basing it vaguely off of ancient Greece. Gold is used only for jewelry, and silver coins are highly valuable and not for everyday transactions.

I suppose food items or booze would work for everyday things, cattle for big purchases.

While the idea of paper currency backed by something in quite recent, would it be too anachronous to have somebody use an IOU as money - say by adding a note on the parchment saying that you are signing it over to someone else?

The particular slave would be worth a lot, since he is huge and very strong, only he has an undeserved reputation for violence, so she might get him cheap.
 

CScottMorris

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I hate to admit it, but the best advice that I can give is not historic research, but good ol Dungeons and Dragons.
Maraxus' research might be more helpful, as it's based on actual economies.
DnD uses the copper/silver/gold currency system, with one gold being worth ten silver, and one silver is worth ten copper. This is done for simplicity. To give you an idea of cost, a simple long-sword is priced at 15 gold pieces(gp), an untrained hireling will put you out a single silver piece(sp) a day, while a trained one is three times that. Food for a day will cost you anywhere 1 to 5 sp. the PHB also lists the value of some basic trade goods:
1 cp = one pound of wheat
2 cp = one pound of flour, or one chicken
1 sp = one pound of iron
1 gp = one pound of cinnamon, or one goat
3 gp = one pig
5 gp = one pound of salt or silver
10 gp = one yard of silk, or one cow

Depending upon the skill of the bodyguard you described, I would guess anywhere from one to five silver a day. If this was a highly skilled mercenary with a reputation, they could command five to ten a day.
Hope this helps.
 

DeleyanLee

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Why name anything specific?

She paid for her meal/sandals/whatever. No need to mention the currency or how much anything cost. Do the cheap/expensive thing by her reaction to how much she had to pay.

She needs to negotiate for a bodyguard? Is the money a source of drama or tension during the discussion? If not, then downplay the cost (He named a price I knew was more than reasonable, but still more than I could afford) and focus the discussion on whatever the tension is.

I never worry about it unless there's an important world-point to make in mentioning these kinds of details.
 

Lhun

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I hate to admit it, but the best advice that I can give is not historic research, but good ol Dungeons and Dragons.
Ah, no. D&D prices are not remotely realistic. Most stuff that's adventurer-relevant is priced to provide game balance not according what it's price should be because of material value or difficulty of production. And the coin system with increasing value of different metals is also strange.
Agreed but here "bronze age" does not really say a lot. Old Mesopotamia, Babylon, Egypt were all stable and rich enough to support currency. The Mesoamerican civilizations used seashells and cacao beans, likewise in China the first shells were used as a pseudo-currency even before the bronze age and in the bronze age metal coins became even more common then in the west.
This is relevant. The Aztecs used cocoa beans as money and gold as wallpaper simply because gold was so much more common and less useful than cocoa beans. Most noble metals don't havy any value in early civilizations, pretty much the only reason to make coins out of them is because they don't tarnish. But that's hardly a requirement, the Spartans traded with iron.
The ranking of gold above silver is also anything but natural. If both metals are fairly common it's completely arbitrary (or culturally/religiously based) which would be the more valuable.
Platinum, as is also used in D&D, is right out. While it is very questionable whether a civilization without advanced chemistry would even be able to tell platinum and silver apart, even if they could, they wouldn't have any way of obtaining platinum in the quantities necessary for even the highest valued coins of a currency.
I second Maraxus suggestion of setting prices by figuring out how much work is involved in creating the relevant product. For a slave, you should go by how much money he'd earn for his owner, dependent on the skills he has.
What the base unit is depends on the civilization. I.e. if it's very rural, the lowest coins will have relatively high value, if there is already a lot of urbanization and thus specialization of labor, coins should be small enough to allow people to buy relatively cheap goods, such as bread.
 

Ruv Draba

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Try here. These were prices for ancient Rome (so, nominally iron age), but should give you a starting point. Also, note the inflation over 100 years. :D
 

Ariella

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Another thing to remember is that goods in pre-industrial societies have different prices in relation to each other than we would expect them to have today.

Textiles, for instance, were very expensive. In order for a woolen garment to be produced, someone had to raise the sheep, someone had to shear them, the wool had to be carded and spun by hand, it had to be woven, dyed and cut by hand, and a tailor had to sew the garment. Nowadays, much of that work is done in mills and in overseas sweatshops where labour is cheap, but pre-industrial people didn't have those processes. I've seen inventories of medieval homes where the bedspreads and bed hangings cost more than the house itself.

Metal things, like tools and cooking pots, were also expensive. I seem to remember another article showing that the price of steel remained almost the same from the Middle Ages to the 1970s, while the price of bread increased a hundredfold. I think the same was true for metals like bronze.
 
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