Where does the money from the depths of the Indian Ocean come from in Russia?

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

Let's dwell on this fact in more detail.

Here is this snippet from the meeting:

The beautiful Kauri shells were indeed mined in the Indian Ocean, off the coast of the Maldives and other islands.

Previously, these shells served not only and not so much as decoration, but as a measure of the exchange of goods. Now they are often compared with money, but money in the modern parasitic system has long ceased to be a means and a measure of exchange, having turned into an independent commodity and the basis of interest on loans. From these positions, to the modern man in the street, an unsecured colored piece of paper seems much more reliable and correct than "some kind of shell".

Which, by the way, was used as a means of payment relatively recently. Here is the official timeline.

In Azerbaijan, cowries were used as money until the 17th century.

Finds of cowrie shells dating back to 800-600 BC were made by archaeologists in northern Germany, Lithuania, Latvia, and on the Baltic Sea islands and near Vitebsk. There are known finds of cowries or obvious fakes for them, dating back to the 6th-7th centuries of our era (in Germany), to the 9th century (in Sweden), to the 11th-12th centuries (in the Pskov and Novgorod lands), to the 16th century (near Riga) …

Finds of shells are especially frequent on the territory of the Novgorod and Pskov lands. Thanks to this fact, experts have the opinion that shells came to Russia from the West. This point of view is supported by numerous finds of cowrie shells in the Baltic States. However, no less often treasures of cowrie shells and burials with them are found in the Volga region.

The Russian name for cowrie shell is uzhovka, beetle, snake (dry) head. The peoples of the Volga region have the name "snake head". The peak of the found treasures of Kauri shells in the territory of North-Western Russia falls on the XII century. However, it is known that back in the 16th century, cowrie was imported in large quantities from Riga to Novgorod.

Celtic gold coins of the 1st century BC depict cowrie shells.

They were in use in Siberia until the beginning of the 19th century.

Pendant necklace decorated with Kauri shells. Mordva. Early XX century

Now shells, as a means of payment, have almost disappeared everywhere, but the memory of the past remained on the coins and banknotes of various countries. The fifty Maldivian rupee note features a cowrie shell.

The name of the bargaining chip of Ghana - cedi - in the language of some tribes of this country denotes the name of the shell of a tsiprey (one of the cowrie varieties).

Cowries weren't the only bargaining chip in the past. Other shells are also immortalized by grateful descendants:

Without going into details, we note that, in general, the history of shells as means of payment, described by historians in the direction of Ancient China - India - other countries, has a turbulent history precisely in Africa, Asia, and the Persian Gulf. There they were gradually replaced by money in the form in which we know them now, and this process was accelerated by the traditional methods of European colonialists: the slave trade, the collapse of the "currency" market of shells by its oversaturation (according to the books of only Hamburg merchants in the 19th century, to West Africa imported at least 75 billion shells with a total weight of 115,000 tons), and other "joys".

One way or another, in this whole story, it is important for us to see that the preserved love of the Russian and other indigenous peoples for exotic shells once again confirms our succession from the Rus-Scythians, Rus-Sarmatians and other tribes, which historians, when out of ignorance, and when and are deliberately called nomadic, taken from nowhere and gone nowhere …