I'd rather have wheat, maize, oats, barley, quinona, rice.... Try eating gold when there's a REAL famine -- there have been times when gold couldn't buy you a handful of grain and I fear that there will be again.

Pre-alphabetic cultures used tokens to indicate quantity and so on: a token with a V on it might mean a given quantity of grain; three such tokens indicated 3 such quantities. You could then exchange 3 V-tokens for one horse, or whatever. One BIG problem, given that the tokens were made of baked clay or carved stones, was counterfeiting. This was "solved" by stamping metal disks, the precursor of coinage. Eventually the "tokens" were discontinued and tallies pressed by a chisel into wet clay tablets, where were then allowed to harden naturally or in an oven (cuneiform). And from there writing developed...and libraries, which were actually repositories for accounting and tax documents.

The farmer is the man....