Northern nomadic people who live on aquatic plants
This is reflected in the different cosmic equivalents used by ancestors during the prosperity of various civilizations. For example, during the prosperous period of farming civilization, the common equivalents exchanged by ancestors were pottery and stone tools, which had a strong settlement habit. In the period when the fishing and hunting civilization was relatively developed, the common equivalents exchanged by ancestors were shellfish and bones, which had a strong fishing and hunting habit.
People who live by fishing in rivers, lakes and seaside.
These universal equivalents will change with the passage of time and the evolution of social civilization. This change is manifested in that when the productivity level of settled agricultural civilization far exceeds that of the other two civilizations, the universally equivalent right to speak and leadership will be mastered by agricultural civilization. Therefore, those universal equivalents in circulation, that is, money, gradually have a fixed shape.
Agricultural cultivation
After agricultural civilization takes the leading position, the society within agricultural civilization will find a generally accepted form to act as currency. The form of this currency generally comes from the common items that occupy an important position in the lives of ancestors, so farm tools have become the only choice for civilized farming currency. With the development of bronze smelting technology, agricultural civilization gave birth to miniature farm tools made of bronze as money.
Shovel coins
In other words, after the social form in ancient China was basically stable, that is, after the agricultural civilization was dominant, the earliest copper coins were evolved from the original agricultural tools such as shovel, hoe and sickle. The most obvious trace of this evolution is the coin evolved from the agricultural tool "shovel", which we can see from the unearthed coins. For example, in the head of early coins, there was a pin (qióng) for inserting the wooden handle. In fact, this kind of pin has no practical use, but for the sake of conceptual recognition, the ancestors cast a pin for the early shovel coins.
Covering soil "pole"
It is worth noting that the "needle" unintentionally cast by ancestors when casting coins has no practical use, but it is an important basis for coin identification. Because the needles of coins are all hollow, there is still dirt in the needles (hence the name "needles"), and the adhesion between the dirt and the inner wall of the needles and the needles in the needles.
Short cloth
Later, the ancients found that the casting of hairpin was not only difficult, but also a waste of raw materials, so the hairpin gradually became flat. With the flattening of hairpins (flat cloth coins will be explained in detail below, so I won't go into details here), shovel coins have gradually become our common cloth coins. From this point of view, cloth coins must undoubtedly be the most important metal currency in China's early period, but the textual research on its earliest appearance time is still a difficult problem. The main reason for its appearance time is that the relationship between the production tool shovel and the original currency (cloth) is difficult to distinguish.
Original coin
Generally speaking, the earlier cloth coins were distributed, the closer their shapes were to the tools of their evolution. Later, due to the gradual weightlessness, they evolved into cloth coins of various shapes. According to archaeological data, most experts in the field of coins believe that the earliest coins were distributed in the middle and late Shang Dynasty.
The square head of the foot of the bridge is covered with a beam.
The head of the cloth coin is hollow and shaped like a hairpin, so it is vividly called "short cloth" by the coin industry. However, the square hollow core and the large and thin body of the hollow cloth make it easy to be broken and inconvenient to carry in large quantities, which greatly limits its circulation to a certain extent. Later, with the development of commerce and the prosperity of trade, money was used more frequently in society, and the shortcomings of these short cloth shapes gradually emerged. So in the late Spring and Autumn Period, the shape of the hollowed-out cloth gradually changed. In the Warring States Period, the hollowed-out cloth finally evolved into a flat shape. This flat currency is called "plain cloth".
Square head and pointed foot Bupingzhou
The so-called flat cloth means that the head at the upper end is no longer hollow, but flat and solid. The style of plain cloth is very complicated, but most of them have two forks, just like having two feet. Therefore, these two sheet-like bifurcations are called "cloth feet". In order to make it easy to distinguish, coin collectors in the later period divided the cloth into four kinds according to the different shapes of the bottom feet: pointed feet, square feet, round feet and bridge feet.
Warring States currency
In a word, "cloth coins", which originated from shovel-shaped farm tools, played an important role in the history of ancient currency development in China. It was the most important currency form in ancient China, and made great contributions to the emergence and development of metal coins in early China.