In recent years, thanks to YouTube, videos have become popular advertising the old thesis that an extraterrestrial race arrived on Earth –Anunnaki – and created the Sumerians, as genetic slaves, to work extracting metals, especially gold.
On the one hand, one might wonder what curious aliens are those who have not realized that the universe, starting with our Moon and continuing with the asteroids, is full of gold. Or why they are able to travel light years through space and don't know how to design a mining robot... Mysteries of the magufo world! In any case, the greatest of the arguments that could be opposed to these singular theses is that for the Sumerians, gold had nothing special. It is assumed that if some gods had taught them the value of that metal so coveted by the divinity, it should be reflected in their culture. And it's not like that.
The Sumerian economy was based on barter . To prevent the markets from becoming a battlefield, the rulers and, later, the kings, annually issued tables of product equivalencies. Thus, any buyer could know that a kilo of wool was equivalent to, for example, two liters of beer, 300 grams of copper or 2 kilos of dates. Thanks to many of these tables that have been preserved to this day, we know that gold was not one of the most expensive metals. There were other materials that surpassed it, such as lapis lazuli, copper, tin and, above all, silver .
The metal of metals between the two rivers was silver. And it was so appreciated that only members of the royal families, governors or high-ranking members of the clergy could wear silver ornaments on their clothing or wear jewelry made of said material. In the Akkadian royal family itself, the daughters of the kings began the custom of wearing what is thought to be a kind of diadem silver.
Another function that this metal fulfilled perfectly was that of a stabilizer of the economic system. Let us imagine a peasant who wants to buy a lamb to celebrate the wedding of his daughter and goes to the market with a certain amount of barley to exchange. What happens if the cattle handler does not need barley? The solution was very easy. The peasant could go to any sacred precinct where the barley was exchanged for its equivalent in silver (he also had the option of resorting to a money changer, but the temples asked for a much lower percentage for the “bank operation ”). With the silver in his possession, he could already buy the lamb with the confidence that this metal would be accepted by any merchant. A curious element is that the silver that the temple gave him was presented in the form of rings weighing 8 grams or spirals in case of large quantities. He not only could wear them comfortably on his fingers and arms, but the rings could be divided into four parts of 2 grams each, like small change.
Another element that indicates the importance they gave to this metal is that it was well considered as a gift to the gods. It was very common that every certain number of years -between 5 and 7-, a temple would organize a procession to visit another temple. Thus, for example, the clergy of the sacred precinct of Ur could visit that of Nippur. They were considered visits from the gods, since the statues of the divinities participated in the trip. In the example specified, the god Nannar of Ur was considered to pay a courtesy visit to his parents Enlil and Ninlil of Nippur. During the procession, gifts of all kinds were exchanged, among which silver gifts were common, as this gave prestige to the temple that delivered them. It was also customary that if a person was rich enough and wanted to give a gift to a god to thank some grace, the gift was silver instead of another metal. The god on duty took you into account more if you gave him a silver penis instead of a gold one. The temples elaborated inventory lists of the objects of the cult (like many current brotherhoods) and many of these lists have come down to us. In them it can be verified, for example, that the scribes placed the objects of said metal at the top of the list.
Finally, and jokingly returning to the initial topic, the defenders of extraterrestrial gold miners also often allege that said gold was necessary for super-advanced computers to work, since, as is well known, gold is a great conductor of electricity. However, anyone who has studied physics knows that the best conductor of electricity in existence is silver. Even in that the Sumerians turned out to be smarter than those bumbling aliens!
Contributed by Joshua BedwyR author of In a Dark Blue World