5

Salt Made The Ancient World Go Round

LoggaWiggler/Pixabay

If you were paying attention in history class, you probably remember that salt and its spice brethren rank up there with love and the conservation of angular momentum as the things that keep the Earth spinning. For our ancestors, salt was their everything.

Morton
They would kill the Morton girl on sight for her wanton wastefulness.

4

There's A Fort Knox For Parmesan Cheese In Italy

Nikoloas Trichakis

Imagine you're a cheese maker. Scratch that, because some of you already took that phrase to a nasty level. Imagine you're a dairy farmer who cultivates the food that we call cheese. If your specialty is Parmesan, you've got a big problem, because your product needs anywhere from 18 months to three years to mature before it's ready for market. And unless you start cutting the cheese before it's ready, you've got no source of income while your baby grows into its full cheesehood. And yes, we know we used the phrase "cutting the cheese."

Fortunately, one bank in Italy figured out a solution to the cheese conundrum. Credito Emiliano accepts wheels of Parmesan as collateral for loans while cheese makers wait for their sources of income to mature. For real. Here's the vault:

Stefano Rellandini/Reuters
One day, humanity will end. The cheese will live on.

3

Ancient China Turned Its Love Of Knives Into Money

Photograph by Mike Peel

Imagine a crazy world in which your currency is determined not by inherited traditions, the Fed, or the Illuminati, but by a room full of action stars. We're pretty sure the system of money they'd come up with is one that ancient Chinese people already perfected: KNIVES.

In the 8th or 9th century, the Chinese began using bronze-cast knives and spades as currency. Not actual knives; that would have been too badass. These were replicas of knives. It's like they looked at the tiny weapons in the Clue box and said, "Yeah, that's what we should use to buy things." Each knife was inscribed with a denomination to show how much it was worth. This one, for example, is worth the souls of six enemies (translation pending).

Birmingham Museums and Art Gallery
They didn't eat with cutlery, but they paid the check with it.

2

Playing Cards Replaced Banknotes In Colonial Canada

testland/Pixabay

While we're used to having the bulk of our money exist as binary code or overhyped bullshit, the same can't be said for most of recorded history. They liked having their cash in a corporeal form, and not just because it allowed them to quickly GTFO should accusations of witchcraft start flying and the plague victims start piling up. You can, therefore, understand the discomfort that the residents of New France (i.e. Canada) were feeling in 1685 after a shipment of cash money from the homeland failed to materialize. It got everyone up in arms -- particularly the soldiers, who, in addition to being up in arms, also possessed the ability to use them if they didn't feel paper cross their palms soon-ish.

Thomas W. Strong
"Use them as clubs; we can't buy new bullets!"

1

Booze Was The Lifeblood Of Several Empires

ShawnaMac1/Pixabay

We don't know whether to be awestruck or slightly nihilistic that one of the most popular forms of currency throughout history is a substance that completely removes you from the world and enhances any not-shit experience into an orgy of mental delirium. There was polio and executions and the rampant nastiness that inspired Game Of Thrones, sure, but were things really that bad?

Back in days of yore, alcohol -- in most cases, beer -- was all but the only game in town when it came to getting paid for a hard day's work. When the ruins of the ancient city of Uruk, Mesopotamia were uncovered, archaeologists discovered (alongside the ghosts) a proto-paycheck entitling some Sector-7B(C) worker drone to a set amount of beer, as well as a shitload of bread to soak it up afterwards. It was the same deal in ancient Egypt. In return for helping with the construction of the pyramids, each worker was given several liters of beer per day, and this was often handed out while they were working. We used to think that the people who built the pyramids were slaves. The reality, however, was less Django Unchained and more Animal House.

Ricardo Liberato
"No one asked them to do this. They just got wasted and started piling things."

Australia, meanwhile, had an economy entirely built upon rum. From 1792, it became commonplace for officers with the New South Wales Corps to swoop in and buy every drop of rum coming into the country via trading ship, before turning around and selling it to the unwillingly sober colonists at inflated prices. It only took a short while for rum to depose money as the dominant currency. Workers would be paid in rum, farmers would be forced to sell their crops for rum, and the NSW Corps -- who soon renamed themselves "the Rum Corps" -- made a tidy profit off the alcoholic apocalypse that they'd caused. You don't need to be told that these guys were British, do you?

National Library of Australia
60 percent of history involves drunkenly resenting the British.

Using beer as currency isn't only an old-timey practice, either. It happened as recently as the 1980s in Angola, after their currency, the kwanza, swan-dived faster than a post-Brexit economy. With consumer prices inflated by a factor of millions, a black market beer economy soon sprang up to fill in the "not letting people starve to death" gap. It was such a success that the government even joined in. Using their diplomatic connections, officials would import foreign beers and sell them on the black market for premium prices, proving that hipsterism is always the strongest force in any financial market.

When they aren't rocking your world with bad puns and weird history (the best kind of history!), Marina and Adam can be found on Twitter.

2016 is almost over. Yes the endless, rotten shit hurricane of a year which took away Bowie, Prince and Florence Henderson and gave us Trump, Harambe and the Zika virus is finally drawing to a close. So, to give this bitch a proper viking funeral, Jack O'Brien and the crew, which includes Dan O'Brien, Alex Schmidt, and comedian Caitlin Gill, are going to send out 2016 with Cracked's year in review in review. They'll rectify where every other year-in-review goes wrong by giving some much needed airtime to the positive stories from the 2016 and shedding light on the year's most important stories that got overlooked. Get your tickets here.

Also check out 7 Bizarre Things (And 1 Bodily Fluid) People Use As Money and 23 Mind-Blowing (True) Facts About Money.

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