Where does gold come from? What does gold represent in different cultures? When did gold start being used as money?
Unique in its endurance and rarity, gold has been valuable throughout the history of mankind. When molten iron formed the Earth's core, it pulled most of the gold on the planet down with it. The gold in the Earth's core could make a 13-inch coating across the entire planet's surface, but of course, it could never be recovered. For the earliest civilizations, gold was a store of value, a medium of exchange, as well as a thing of beauty. For the Egyptians, gold represented the sun that gods, their rulers, and eternal life. The Incas described gold as the tears of the sun. And the Greek Author Homer, in the Iliad and the Odyssey, saw gold as wealth for humans, and the glory of the Immortals. The first use of precious metals as money took place around 700 BC with coins struck by the merchants of Libya, which were actually formed from a naturally occurring mixture of gold and silver known as electrum. Gold's unique properties enabled the Templars to create the first banks in 13th century Europe, as people were able to store their gold in one bank and borrow against it elsewhere as they traveled across the continent....