ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1997, Roanoke Times
DATE: Saturday, February 15, 1997 TAG: 9702170078
SECTION: BUSINESS PAGE: A-5 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: LONDON
SOURCE: GRAHAM HEATHCOTE THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
A NEW GALLERY at the British Museum shows that the "root of all evil" comes in many shapes and sizes, from shells to copper plates.
In Mesopotamia 4,500 years ago, a father put a price on his daughter: He sold her into slavery for 2.5 shekels, or 21 grams of silver, about $3.67 at today's prices.
The record of that transaction, scratched on a clay tablet, is one of the more unusual of the 3,000 exhibits in the new Money Gallery at the British Museum.
``That was what she was worth - shocking to us, but not extraordinary at the time,'' said Robert Anderson, director of the British Museum. ``I think the people of those days would be shocked by our labor costs.''
Money - or the love of it - has been called the root of all evil, but it makes the world work. As the new exhibit shows, it comes in all shapes and sizes, from shells to copper plates, coins, bank notes and even eggs in 19th-century Guatemala. The Incas in South America valued shells more than gold.
``It is the first such gallery in a general museum anywhere, and we could do it because we believe we have the finest collection of money in the world,'' Anderson said before the gallery opened Jan.31.
A book about the gallery opens with a Flemish painting from 1514 showing a moneylender and his wife counting and weighing coins. Next to it is a shot from the Hollywood movie ``Gold Diggers of 1933'' featuring a chorus line singing ``We're in the Money'' while wearing costumes decorated with silver dollars.
The gallery display includes the first use of weighed silver and other metals in antiquity, a 1901 cash register and an electronic terminal manufactured last year to make payments with debit cards.
``The museum had coins from the start when it was founded in 1753 ... and it has been collecting money ever since,'' said Joe Cribb, the gallery's curator. ``We now have the finest collection of money in the world, nearly 1 million items.''
Among the fascinating items is a list of expenses written on wood by a second-century Roman legionnaire and found preserved in wet ground at Hadrian's Wall in northern England.
Andy Meadows, a curator of antique coins, said a list of finances for maintaining a fort at the wall show what commodities cost during the Roman occupation: a bronze coin called an ``as'' would buy 50 hobnails.
The as and the silver denarius were the two principal Roman coins following a currency reform in 212 B.C.
``We do know that there wasn't a Roman coin small enough to buy a pint of beer,'' Meadows said. ``What did they do? Probably bought a round.''
There are bright and gleaming gold bars from ancient Rome and Egypt - gold doesn't tarnish, even when buried.
There is paper money, invented in China in the 11th century, which degenerated into mind-boggling sums in 20th-century inflation: a 1923 German bank note with face value of 1billion marks and a 1946 Hungarian note of 100,000billion pengoes.
Europe's first bank notes originated in 17th-century Sweden when Johan Palmstruch, a banker, suggested using pieces of paper for money in place of sheets of copper that weighed up to 44 pounds.
The sheets had been introduced to help maintain the price of Swedish copper but were heavy and were depreciating in value.
There are children's money boxes and a leather bag of coins given to the museum by the Court of Chancery, which had held the money for 250 years in an unresolved legal case called Jones vs. Lloyd.
Why Jones sued Lloyd is no longer known. The four gold and 1,746 silver coins, dated in the last quarter of the 17th century, had a face value of about $375 then and are worth thousands of dollars today. Several of the coins, however, are counterfeit.
Quantities of old gold and silver coins dug up in England are in the gallery after being declared treasure trove and therefore state property.
One such hoard found by a man in a field at Didcot, 50 miles northwest of London, contained 126 Roman aurei, the principal gold denomination of the empire.
``It was buried in a pot about 180 A.D. at the end of the reign of Marcus Aurelius,'' Meadows said. ``As one coin was equal to a month's pay, it must have been a legionary's savings for 10 1/2 years.''
The money would be worth $224,000 today. ``We'll never know who he was, why he buried it and why he never went back to collect it,'' Meadows said.
LENGTH: Medium: 87 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: AP. The artistry of the design of money is shown in aby CNBselection of items from around the world at the British Museum in
London. color.