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Croesus was a king in what's now western Turkey.
克羅伊斯曾經(jīng)是今土耳其西部地區(qū)的王。
His kingdom, Lydia, was among the new powers that emerged across the Middle East about three thousand years ago, so it was part of that wider political upheaval that I've been exploring this week.
他的王國(guó)呂底亞是三千年前中東地區(qū)涌現(xiàn)的新勢(shì)力之一。因此這是我本周一直在探索更廣泛的政治動(dòng)蕩的其中之一。
But in this programme, I want to look at a different kind of new power -or more precisely, I want to look at the creation of a new type of object that would ultimately become a power in its own right: coinage.
正是這些金幣讓呂底亞和克羅伊斯王富甲一方。它是一種新形式的物品，靠自身的價(jià)值獲得力量。
We've all grown so accustomed to using little round pieces of metal to buy things, that it's easy to forget that coins arrived quite late in the history of the world.
我們現(xiàn)在都很習(xí)慣用小而圓的金屬塊購(gòu)買(mǎi)物品，但很少有人知道，貨幣在世界舞臺(tái)上出現(xiàn)的時(shí)間并不太長(zhǎng)。
For over two thousand years, states ran complex economies and international trading networks without a coin to hand.
在超過(guò)兩千年的時(shí)間里，世界各國(guó)擁有復(fù)雜的經(jīng)濟(jì)制度和國(guó)際貿(mào)易網(wǎng)絡(luò)，卻并沒(méi)有貨幣。
The Egyptians, for example, used a sophisticated system that measured value against standard weights of copper and gold, but as new states and new ways of organising trade emerged, coinage began to make an appearance, and fascinatingly, it happened independently in two different parts of the world at almost the same time.
比如埃及，就曾使用一套以銅和金的標(biāo)準(zhǔn)重量為基準(zhǔn)的復(fù)雜體系來(lái)衡量?jī)r(jià)值。但隨著新的國(guó)家與新的貿(mào)易線(xiàn)路不斷產(chǎn)生，對(duì)貨幣的需求產(chǎn)生了。奇妙的是，貨幣幾乎是同時(shí)在兩個(gè)相隔甚遠(yuǎn)的地區(qū)獨(dú)立出現(xiàn)的。
In China they began using miniature spades and knives in very much the same way that we would now use coins, and virtually simultaneously in the Mediterranean world, the Lydians started making actual coins as we would recognise them today-round shapes in precious metals.
中國(guó)人發(fā)明的通貨外形像小型的矛和刀，但用途與今天的貨幣別無(wú)二致。而在中東地區(qū)，呂底亞制造的貨幣我們今天仍能一眼認(rèn)出—他們釆用了與如今貨幣相 同的圓形貴金屬片。
