Rud’s father—whom we know was a potter and also a coppersmith—and his apprentices (that is, the inhabitants of Sialk, who had copper-smelting furnaces in their homes) brought into the world something now known as “commerce.” Until the day Rud’s father and the other inhabitants of Sialk created industry, trade had no meaning in Iran, because each person, with each family, could meet their own needs. No one possessed something that another lacked and thus felt a need for. But after coppersmithing expanded in Sialk and the people there became specialists in making all kinds of tools and various vessels from copper, the inhabitants of Iran’s cities needed the people of Sialk to obtain copper tools and utensils. They brought sheep and horses, purchased the copper tools and vessels from the people of that city, and took them away; and thus “trade” came into being. Copper tools and vessels became so necessary that, over time, a copper sickle or a copper knife became the “currency” of that era; and after a while, copper itself—once it came out of the furnace—was used as a medium of exchange. Whoever wished to acquire something would carry a piece of copper, circular or square in shape, and buy what he wanted, paying in copper; and as prices gradually became classified, smaller pieces of copper were carried to buy lower-priced items. This is the very practice we still follow today, and in some countries of the world “copper money” is still in circulation.¹
In any case, after cooking food in copper vessels was discontinued in Sialk, the dangerous disease that had made the people of that city sick and weak—and had sent many of them to their deaths—disappeared. Anyone who came to Sialk to buy copperware would hear from the townspeople that food must not be cooked in those vessels; and since people in other cities did not use metal vessels for cooking, they devoted their efforts to making other things from copper.
The Turs—who, as we have said, lived in the east of Iran—felt, like others, that they needed copper tools and implements; but owing to their savagery they did not wish to obtain those tools through trade, and imagined they had the right to seize the Iranians’ tools and equipment. We saw that the first time the Turs attacked an Iranian city it was to take fire. Afterwards, repeatedly, they attacked the cities of southern Iran to seize what the Iranians possessed; but their assaults were weak, and, as mentioned, the southern cities of Iran united to repel them and protect their property.
The better the Iranians’ way of life became, the more the Turs set greedy eyes on Iranian wealth. As long as Iran’s central lake existed—its shores girded by vast forests where herbivores grazed—the Turs were well-provisioned: they hunted animals and ate the meat raw, and later, after they had obtained fire from the Iranians and imitated the peoples of southern Iran in the custom of cooking, they cooked their food. But after Iran’s central lake dried up, they grew hungry. Obviously, the forests around the lake did not dry out in a single day, nor did the herbivores vanish in two days; and even after the lake dried, for a time the Turs—whose land the Iranians called “Turan”—still found game and filled their bellies. Yet some time after the forests dried, the matter of filling the belly—which was a vital issue—became difficult for the Turs.
Out of laziness they could not—or would not—sow wheat and raise domestic animals. Sowing wheat required toil, and tending domestic beasts demanded constant care; and since hunger pressed them, and they needed to procure for themselves the means of life the Iranians possessed, they fell upon the cities of southern Iran. Thus the first wars between Turanians and Iranians—which can be regarded as the first wars of humankind—had an economic cause. Perhaps there were wars among human tribes before the Turanian-Iranian conflicts, but no trace of them remains today; therefore, for us they have no meaning. The wars between Turanians and Iranians are the first whose mark endures in the history of Iran and the world, and, like today’s wars, they had an economic cause.
¹ This refers to the earliest stage of commodity money in prehistoric Iran, when the people of Sialk and contemporary settlements used small weighed pieces of copper as a means of exchange. Archaeological finds from Tepe Sialk and other sites indicate transactions involving metal fragments by weight, representing a proto-monetary system long before the invention of coinage.
See: V. G. Childe, The Prehistory of Persia, London, 1951; and Roman Ghirshman, Iran: From the Earliest Times to the Islamic Conquest, Penguin Books, 1954.
