In the 1880s Monet settled in Giverny,
outside of Paris. There he painted one of
his most famous series of paintings,
called Water Lilies. Monet died on
December 5, 1926, in Giverny.
Money
Whenever people pay for goods or services,
they use some form of money.
Money can be almost anything, as long
as everyone agrees on its value. One of
the earliest forms of money was metal,
such as gold or silver. In North America,
Native Americans used beads made of
shell, called wampum, as a form of
money.
How MoneyWorks
People used to pay for things through
barter, or trading. But each trading partner
had to have something that the
other one wanted. And the two things
had to be of equal value. Modern living
would be impossible under this system.
People invented money to avoid barter.
In a money system, a buyer does not
Claude Monet stands beside two of his
paintings.
Different countries have different currencies,
or kinds of money. The money of the United
States is called the dollar.
160 Monet, Claude BRITANNICA STUDENT ENCYCLOPEDIA
have to have something that the seller
happens to need. The seller will always
accept payment in money, because the
seller can use the same money later to
buy almost anything.
Today the metal coins and pieces of
paper that people use for money have
little real value. In other words, people
do not use the paper for writing or the
metal for making tools. The value of
paper money and coins comes from an
agreement between all people. They
agree that they will accept certain forms
of money in exchange for their goods
and services. This agreement between
people is the reason money works.
History
People have used money for more than
4,000 years. In the 600s BC the kingdom
of Lydia in what is now Turkey began to
make coins. It was probably the first
government to do so. These coins were a
combination of silver and gold, called
electrum. Many ancient peoples, including
the Greeks and the Romans, also
used coins.
The first types of paper money were
used in China more than 1,000 years
ago. Early paper money was simply a
written promise to pay a certain amount
of gold or silver money. The paper
money was valuable because it could be
traded for gold or silver. Later, governments
began printing paper money. In
the 1900s most governments made
paper money valuable on its own. It no
longer stood for gold or silver. Today
people often exchange money electronically,
through computers.
#More to explore
Trade
Mongol Empire
The Mongol people were a group of
tribes from the grasslands of central
Asia. In the early 1200s a warrior named
Genghis Khan united the tribes and
built a mighty empire. At the height of
its power, the empire stretched from
what are now China and Korea to eastern
Europe.
Genghis Khan
The Mongols’ homeland lay in what are
now Mongolia and northern China.
Mongol tribes raised animals and moved
from place to place. The tribes sometimes
banded together in groups. Near
the end of the 1100s, a leader named
Temujin took control of a group called
All the Mongols. In 1206 he took the
title of Genghis Khan, which means
“universal ruler.”
People across Asia feared Genghis
Khan’s armies. His soldiers rode horses
and fought with bows and arrows. By
1215 the Mongols had taken northern
China. When Genghis Khan died in
1227, the Mongols controlled land from
the coast of China all the way to European
Russia.
After Genghis Khan
Genghis Khan’s sons and grandsons
continued to build the empire after his
The
descendants of
the Mongols
now live in
Mongolia,
China, and
Russia.
BRITANNICA STUDENT ENCYCLOPEDIA Mongol Empire 161
death. One of his grandsons, called Batu
Khan, led a Mongol group called the
Golden Horde. The Golden Horde
moved west from Russia into Hungary.
In 1251 Mongke, another grandson of
Genghis Khan, became khan, or ruler of
the Mongol Empire. Mongke’s armies
conquered Persia (Iran) and Iraq. Only
defeat by an Egyptian army kept them
from moving farther west.
In 1260 Mongke’s brother Kublai, also a
grandson of Genghis Khan, became the
new khan. Mongol power reached its
highest point during his rule. Kublai
Khan was interested mainly in China,
though, and thought of himself as a
Chinese emperor. He even moved his
capital to what is now Beijing. He then
defeated the Song Dynasty of southern
China and established the Yuan, or
Mongol, Dynasty over all of China.
That dynasty lasted until 1368.
Fall of the Empire
The Mongol Empire began to fall apart
in the 1300s. The Ming Dynasty took
over China in about 1368. In 1380 a
group led by Russians defeated the
Golden Horde.
The last important Mongol ruler was
Timur, or Tamerlane, who died in 1405.
His conquests ranged from India and
Russia to the Mediterranean Sea. But
soon the empire was reduced to the
original Mongol homeland and scattered
kingdoms.
The Mongols lost power partly because
of the way that they ruled their territories.
The Mongols depended on local
people to rule the conquered lands from
day to day. As a result, power slipped
away from the Mongol rulers.
#More to explore
Genghis Khan • Mongolia
162 Mongol Empire BRITANNICA STUDENT ENCYCLOPEDIA
Mongolia
Mongolia is a large, mountainous country
