Why do we love gold so much?
A story of quality, rarity and, beauty.
Almost universally gold is a sign of wealth, better yet, gold is literal wealth.
Gold is the highest standard of wealth possible.
Gold is one of the safest investments, it will always be valuable and it doesn’t tarnish over time as most metals.
As recently as the three decades that followed the Second World War, known as the Bretton Woods period, gold was, together with the dollar, the standard that defined the worth of the world’s currencies.
So until very recently, even though people were using paper money to buy goods and services, they were, in fact, using gold.
But, why is it so valuable?
Gold’s value depends, in part, on its practical uses.
Gold, for thousands of years, has been used in medical treatments.
- Traditional Chinese medicine has used gold to treat things such as seizures or skin infections.
- The Ancient Romans used gold in dentistry, primarily because it doesn’t harm the body as most other metals.
Nowadays, gold has a new, more advanced use: electronics.
- Gold is highly conductive, easy to work with due to its malleability, and it doesn’t tarnish, making it an excellent electrical conductor, superior to copper and silver.
But the one thing gold is very renowned for, and always has been used as, is jewelry.
- Durable, malleable, and beautiful. You can’t replace something like it.
- Apart from the natural properties, it has its symbolic value that automatically confers status to its owner and it could even count as an investment since it doesn’t lose its value.
Also, gold is not only useful, it is rare.
The one thing that motivates people to acquire something more than its quality, is its rarity.
People prefer to have something exclusive rather than something of quality.
- Having access to gold is the same as having access to great resources since finding it and processing it requires a lot of time and effort.
- So apart from it being used as literal currency for a long time, even before it was used as money it symbolized great wealth, and with it came power.
In Ancient Egypt gold was rather abundant in the Eastern Desert, between the Nile and the Red Sea. The conditions were harsh, but the growing centralized power of the Pharaoh allowed him to maneuver enough people (likely slaves) and resources to prospect for gold.
Ancient Egypt became famous for its gold and gold work. Many of the techniques modern artisans employ today can be traced back to it. Egyptian relation with gold began in the 4th millennium BC and had its peak between 1500 and 1300 BC.
The famous Pharaoh Tutankhamun lived during this period and his tomb perfectly demonstrates how power and gold the same. He was buried with a total weight of 1,200 Kg of gold, divided by jewelry and other artifacts, like his third of three coffins, made of 110 Kg of solid gold.
Gold’s value and symbolism are such that in many religions and myths, gold has a meaningful presence.
- The Ark of the Covenant, the most sacred relic of Judaism, would have been covered in gold.
- In Aztec culture, gold had a somewhat contradictory meaning, being called “excrement of the gods.” It could either heal you or make you sick.
- In the Christian Bible, in Revelations is stated that Heaven will have streets of solid gold.
- In Hinduism, gold is the symbol of the goddess Lakshmi, and is often present in religious ceremonies and weddings.
- In Norse mythology, Odin has a ring called Draupnir made of gold. This ring can multiply itself. Every ninth night, eight new equal rings are generated from it.
- In Greek mythology, King Midas asked for Dionysus the power to turn everything he touched into gold. According to Aristotle, he eventually died of starvation after turning all food into gold.
Yet, after all, it doesn’t answer the question of the origin of its value…
Iron has tons of more uses, some of which are crucial for the function of our societies since the dawn of the Iron Age.
As for rarity, for example, platinum is rarer than gold and even more durable.
It’s not so simple…
Iron may be more useful, but it doesn’t last nearly as much and it is too common. Now platinum is way too rare, making it not viable to become something like currency.
But, the one thing all those metals miss, is gold’s beauty.
Beauty is subjective, but some forms of beauty are more universally accepted than others.
The Egyptians, the Aztecs, the Greeks and Romans, the Chinese, the Indians, and the Arabs, just to name a few. Many were the great civilizations who were intoxicated with gold’s beauty.
Gold might mean wealth, power, and divinity, but before them, it had to mean beauty.
If a great variety of peoples who never had contact with each other came to value gold’s beauty so much on their own, it can only be concluded that cultural differences had little to do with it.
Why would the first people to find gold associate it with those concepts before anyone else wanted it?
Gold now, as thousands of years before, means wealth and power because everyone else wants it, but before people began to seek it, it had to be considered beautiful enough for someone to exchange it for a cow, crops, land, or kill for it.
Gold has no obvious use for hunter-gatherers or farmers apart from its subject beauty.
The earliest known gold artefacts are jewellery, aesthetic pieces. They were found in the Varna Necropolis, Bulgaria, dated to be from the 5th millennium BC. And although they certainly meant some degree of hierarchical power, they were probably chosen because of their beauty.
Final note
Wherever you look, you will find some deep symbolism associated with gold.
It will be very hard to find anyone today who doesn’t care even a little about gold.
Gold’s hegemony is undisputed and will likely stay like that. As much as there is talk of Bitcoin becoming the next gold in currency terms (unlikely in my opinion), no one will ever put a cryptocurrency around a lover’s finger.
If history may teach us something about gold, is that it is, in fact, eternal.
