What a coinkidink, I just finished watching episode 2 of "Connections" with James Burke which mentions this in the beginning of the episode, when talking about the invention of currency. The article from Egypt Today doesn't seem to mention the discovery of touchstone (which the episode does), which seemed like an important detail of "why gold?".
It necessarily has a unit of account, but you can undertake all kinds of transactions under a credit system with nobody involved exchanging, or intending to exchange, that actual thing (silver coins, goats, bails of flax, abstract “favors”, whatever)
I had the same question about touchstone from the same episode. I am becoming a Burke-ite after digging up the mention of 'The Trigger Effect' episode of the 70's 'Connections' from an HN Crowdstrike thread and am now binge-watching the entire first series. Amazing stuff.
I'd recently read 'The Ascent of Money', Ferguson, and was thinking there's more to be understood than what I found there. I've got 'Debt: The First 5000 Years', Graeber, in my queue, but am looking for other resources. Any ideas?
Seems it's available on the Internet Archive too: https://archive.org/details/james-burke-connections_s01e02