Chapter 7 Section 6 Place Names on Pre-Qin Currencies

Historians often refer to the long period before the unification of Qin as pre-Qin.In the pre-Qin period, due to the development of agriculture and handicrafts, commerce and cities also became more and more prosperous. As a medium of exchange, shellfish could no longer meet the needs, so metal currency began to appear.In the Zhou and Qin Dynasties, it was mostly round money with a hole in the middle.The currencies of Zhao, Han, and Wei are mostly shovel-shaped "cloth" (a borrowed word for "镈"), and there are various forms such as empty head cloth, flat head cloth, pointed foot cloth, and round span cloth.Knife-shaped coins are mostly used in Yan, Qi and Zhao countries.There are many place names on these knives and cloth coins, such as "Eastern Zhou" (now Luoyang area), Pingyin (now Shandong Pingyin), Jinyang (Shanxi Taiyuan) and other place names on various cloth coins.The currency of Chu is famous for Yuan and Ant Biqian. Yuan is a small piece of gold cake, and a large piece can be divided into many small pieces, also known as "cake gold". Yuan", which was later moved to Chen (now Huaiyang, Henan) and called "Chen Yuan".Ant nose money is a kind of auxiliary coin, which looks like a shell.The characters of these coins have also become one of the clues for us to study ancient place names.