Half of the gold that the Allied powers recovered from Nazi Germany's looting of European central banks took the form of gold coins from the classical era of the gold standard, the period leading up to the First World War. The lions share of all the gold in the world has, at one point or another, ended up in mints to be worked for emperors, kings, nobility, ecclesiastical magnates, republics and private proprietors. In this book, the history of gold coinage and currencies is outlined, from the city states of ancient civilisation in Asia Minor in the seventh century BC, to the globalisation of trade and rise of powerful states in the modern world.Gold coinages and gold currencies have been one of the building blocks of human societies: intrinsic to urbanisation, state formation, the development of commerce and the prosecution of war. They have captured artistic imaginations; for over 2,500 years power, glory and beauty provide the backdrop for gold as a monetary phenomenon.Svein H. Gullbekk is Professor of Numismatics at the Museum of Cultural History, Oslo University. He has published several books and articles on numismatics, and the history of money as well as a series of books for the general public. He is currently leading an international research project on Religion and Money: Economy of Salvation in the Middle Ages funded by the Norwegian Research Council.
Editorial Reviews
 | “…an exciting new addition to this body of scholarship … [it] will be of great interest to not just students and scholars of Hindu traditions, but students and scholars of Sanskrit literature, students and scholars of mythology, and students and scholars of gender and religion as well.”
—Religious Studies Review
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| “The Literary Life of Yājñavalkya sets new standards in the examination of religious literary figures in South Asian textual traditions and is an exemplar of how philological and literary analysis should evolve to better accommodate the cultural investments of original literary communities. This study comes as a pertinent and much-needed reminder that even as historical facticity may not be a primary concern of literary characterizations, literary characterizations are indeed a historical fact in themselves.”
—Religions of South Asia
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| “…a valuable resource for readers of the Upaniṣads, post-Vedic Brahminical mythology, and Sanskrit literature more broadly … this title will no doubt become a benchmark work within Vedic studies, and will additionally inspire with its example a much wider audience of scholars engaging Hindu mythology.”
—Reading Religion
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| “Lindquist traces the textual references to Yājñavalkya from their pre-Buddhist beginnings to their classical and postclassical contexts, all while avoiding the pitfalls of mostly pointless inquiries into the 'historicity' of Yājñavalkya. As such, the book is unique within the field of Indology because it goes beyond the usual dismissive descriptions of such personalities as mere eponyms or arbitrary placeholders for sagely authority. In contrast, Lindquist shows how coherent features of thought and rhetorical style provided a solid core text-persona called Yājñavalkya, around whom a host of distinctive ideas and styles of debate and expression were carried through several genres of Vedic and classical Hindu sacred writing.”
—Donald R. Davis Jr., University of Texas at Austin
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