A shortage of silver caused by the collapse of leading Bronze Age civilizations around the eastern Mediterranean about 1200 B.C. resulted in the original "dirty money" - several hundreds of years before coins had been invented.

The ancient counterfeiting was revealed by archaeologist Tzilla Eshel, then a doctoral student at the University of Haifa, who studied the chemical composition of 35 buried hoards of Bronze Age silver found at archaeological sites around Israel.

In eight of the hoards - dating from the time of the "Late Bronze Age collapse," when the region's most powerful kingdoms suffered often-violent demises - had been deliberately debased, with cheaper alloys of copper substituted for much of the silver and an outer surface that looked like pure silver.

Because the hoards date back to the when the region, then known as Canaan, was ruled by ancient Egypt, the researchers think this deception originated with the Egyptian rulers, possibly to disguise the fact that their supplies of the precious silver widely used as currency were failing.

Canaan had no silver ores of its own, and the precious metal had to be imported. But the silver trade appears to have quickly come to an end when the nearby kingdoms started collapsing between about 1200 and 1150 B.C.

"There was a shortage of silver, probably related to the Late Bronze Age collapse," Eshel told Live Science. "[Counterfeiting] continued after the Egyptians left Canaan, but they were probably the ones who initiated it."

To read the complete article, see:
Ancient Egyptian hoard of counterfeit 'dirty money' unearthed(https://www.livescience.com/ancient-egyptian-hoard-counterfeit-dirty-money.html)