Talk:Rai stones/Archives/2021

Were they really money?

The description of the uses of the stones does not seem to fit any common definition of money. The stones were not fungible (each one had its own value, that depended on its workmanship and history), were not used in ordinary transactions, and could not be fractionated. There is no evidence in the article that the stones had a definite relative value ("this stone is worth twice as much as that one"). Also there is no mention of whether the natives used some other commodity as money in their commercial transactions.
Rater than money, those features would make the stones more similar to our works of art, antiquities, or diamonds.
Thus it would seem more prudent to state that them being "money" is an interpretation of some foreign authors, possibly based on peculiar definitions of "money" -- and not a reasonably unquestioned "fact".
--Jorge Stolfi (talk) 18:39, 15 January 2021 (UTC)