For millennia, people had gotten what they needed to survive by trading with others. Eventually, with the formation of large cities and empires, and of personal wealth, simple bartering was found to be insufficient to acquire what was wanted. (How many chickens does a trireme cost?) With the advent of Currency, a person could use a token (usually of precious metal) to simply represent the value that he was trading, with the backing of the governments coffers. Not surprisingly, coinage was first used in the old Persian empire, and quickly spread to every other nation of any size.