Chapter 7

Phrygia, Finance, And Front Man

The Assyrian conquests, culminating in the looting of Egypt from 671 thru 661 B.C., despite seeming a revolt by an ethnonationalist empire, come back from near extinction, soon to gain that full honor, fed the very banking networks that it sought to stamp out. For instance the loot from the temple of Amon at Karnak, would have been in 1974 dollars, worth $186,648,000. A description of the sacred metals in their old temple context is given by Diodorus in 57 B.C., writing of times ancient to him:

“So that there was no city under the sun so adorned with so many stately monuments of of gold, silver, and ivory, and multitudes of colossi and obelisks, each cut out of an entire stone…”

Electrum is listed as an alloy of 75% gold, 22% silver and 3% copper.

Phrygia, in northwestern Asia Minor had been an earlier, possible Hittite source of iron and steel. It remained after the vanishing of the Hittites as a “peasant kingdom” with a strong iron craft artisan class. As late as the battle of Cannae in the late 200s B.C. one Roman writes to another, “Who was not wounded there with Phrygian steel?”

Lydia was a minting center near Phrygia, where the grifter agent of Babylon Sadyattes, latter dispossessed and executed by Croesus, who in his turn is disposed of by Cyrus, managed a regional mint. This mint, close to quality weapon manufacture, would be the target of various barbarian invasions, from the Cimmerians circa 750 B.C. to the Gauls circa 260 B.C. With chariot production transferred to Egypt and steel a thing of far western Asia Minor, empire divorced from national presumptions were required to dominate, and also encouraged by the financial class. The scramble for lost knowledge and the touring of learned men such as Solon and Anacharsis of this period, reflects a mature international class of scholars. There is little indication if this is related to finance and may simply be a parallel trend.

The looting of temple gold and silver, along with the increasing abundance of iron and growing obsolescence of bronze, Astle indicates, served the wicked ends of inflation. For gangs of slaves could strip bronze and iron from the dead on battlefields and their masters could then use this to adulterate coinage and extract bullion to an area with a shortage of money, perhaps a new region for financial development where the ruling class had long used pure silver and gold as jewelry/money and would not accept alloys.

Pheidon, King of Argos in 680, arch enemy state of anti-money Sparta who reigned in the age of Lucurgus, the money abolisher of Sparta, established a 400 to 1 silver/ iron alloy coin as his national standard to match international metrics. At about this time, the Egyptian kopish sword is adopted as the Argive side arm, eventually to evolve into the Nepalese kukri. Naturalized “Greeks” who had immigrated from eastern financial centers to work in manufacture and finance were beginning to establish true international interests in internal city state politics. This person was typified by the trapezitae who sat on a small stool in the agora, the center of each Greek polis, save Sparta, which had as its focus the sacred grove and the military barracks. The “progressive” activities of sell out kings and tyrants like Pheidon is summarized by Astle as a growth of deposit banking, something we are familiar with in modern America.

He sights two banking house, which each lasted at least 100 years, having done work under the Assyrian King Nabopolassar, father of Nebuchadrezzar and the Persia Darius Hystaspes. These houses are evidenced by clay checks and deeds found in an earthenware jar by Arabs. The houses were Egibi Sons and Murassu.

Astle is in his own groove here with the moral vision of ancient finance, convincing me he must have hated that awful movie its A Wonderful Life.

“...the systematic spreading of money madness amongst the landed aristocracy of Greece, thus separting them from their peoples… For their peoples and their labours had now become but cyphers; desirable wealth assessed as according to the figures in the banker’s book.”

But the banker is doomed as well by his own grift.

“They are but pudgy and sly little men as much overwhelmed by the monster they have raised, as are the foolish nations that permitted them to do so.”

Western financial methods were not invented in the 12th Century A.D. but were there a mere colonial adaptation of an ancient near eastern practice. The many poor laws and criminalization of poverty in the Late Medieval and Early Modern periods in Western Europe had a deep antiquity and ere not the innovations we suppose. Just as William Moraley, Petter Williamson, Golieb Mitterberger, John Harrower, Davvy Crockett and William Garrison would discover, it was the same in antiquity, save for the language:

“Behind the Aramaic speaking banker came the slave trader, and it was not long before the poor people found that the king’s law was no longer for them…”

Citizenship would always be easy to obtain for those with money. When the banker no longer needed the king, or the cabal of oligarchs, revolution would be funded and a more malleable rabble would be given a voice, bought by the same agents that supplied the weapons:

“...stirred active resentment against their former leaders… and who, of course, had no more understanding than themselves of that force by which they were both being manipulated…”

One wonders, was this the point of Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings?