A widely cited source for the idea that tracking debt is the origin of money is David Graeber's book, Debt: The First 5,000 Years. Graeber argues, based on historical, ethnographic, and archaeological evidence, that systems of credit and debt predate both coinage and barter. He contends that early economies operated on the basis of credit-essentially, records of who owed what to whom-long before the invention of physical money, and that money itself originated as a means of accounting for these debts[1][2][5].
This view is supported by the "credit theory of money," which holds that money's essential function is to serve as a unit of account for debts, rather than as a commodity for barter. Early monetary tokens, including coins, were often created as representations of units of account-essentially IOUs-rather than as valuable objects in themselves[2][4].
For further reading, see:
David Graeber, Debt: The First 5,000 Years[1][2]
Alfred Mitchell-Innes, "What is Money?" (1913) and "The Credit Theory of Money" (1914)[2][4]
Eduardo Garzón Espinosa, "The origin of money from the money-debt approach"[4]
Another narrative links money to debt: