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In these seminars I will try to give a sketch of the area in which I am prepared to exhibit my ignorance and to answer questions that you care to ask. Go on asking the same question as often as you like and I will answer it if I can, although probably in a different way each time.
I shall start with a fable, in the guise of an historical account of the Royal Cemetery at Ur. On the death of the king the entire court processed into an excavation, since called ‘The Death Pit’, and there, dressed in their finery and jewels, took a drug from a small cup later found by each body.
Five hundred years later, without any publicity, the tombs were robbed. It was a courageous thing to do because the Cemetery had been sanctified by the death and burial of the Royal Family. The robbers were the patrons of the scientific method: the first who dared to break through the ghostly sentinels of the dead and their priestly attendants.
This primitive reconstruction, which is not history, archaeology or art, might be categorized from a religious, aesthetic or scientific vertex. In Grid terms we might say that it is a C category construction.
Continuing this use of fable into the domain of finance: money was early used as a mode of communication in religious observance, the communication then being between corporeal beings like humans, and others such as the ghostly sentinels at Ur. Later, it was used by the Anglo-Saxons as ‘wergild’ to compensate for the loss of life or blood, and ‘bride-purchase’ to compensate for the loss of a bride from the membership of a group. The convenience of this method of communication, analogous to the convenience of speech, made it suitable for take-over for purposes of exchange and communication in commerce.