use, which was an order on a banker desiring him to pay the money of the note to a third person, which corresponds to the definition of a bill of exchange as we understand it today. During the Buddhist period, there was considerable use of these instruments. Merchants in large towns gave letters of credit to one another. China Main : History of banking in China In ancient China, starting in the Qin Dynasty (221 to 206 BCE), Chinese currency developed with the introduction of standardized coins that allowed easier trade across China, and led to development of letters of credit. These letters were issued by merchants who acted in ways that today we would understand as banks. Ancient Egypt Some scholars suggest that the Egyptian grain-banking system became so well-developed that it was comparable to major modern banks, both in terms of its number of branches and employees, and in terms of the total volume of transactions. During the rule of the Greek Ptolemies, the granaries were transformed into a network of banks centered in Alexandria, where the main accounts from all of the Egyptian regional grain-banks were recorded. This became the site of one of the earliest known government central banks, and may have reached its peak with the assistance of Greek bankers. According to Muir (2009) there were two types of banks operating within Egypt: royal and private. Documents made to show the banking of taxes were known as peptoken-records. Greece Trapezitica is the first source documenting banking (de Soto – p. 41). The speeches of Demosthenes contain numerous references to the issuing of credit (Millett p. 5). Xenophon is credited to have made the first suggestion of the creation of an organisation known in the modern definition as a joint-stock bank in On Revenues written circa 353 BCE The city-states of Greece after the Persian Wars produced a government and culture sufficiently organized for the birth of a private citizenship and therefore an embryonic capitalist society, allowing for the separation of wealth from exclusive state ownership to the possibility of ownership by the individual. According to one source (Dandamaev et al.), trapezites were the first to trade using money, during the 5th century BCE, as opposed to earlier trade which occurred using forms of pre-money. Specific focus of funds The earliest forms of storage utilized were the rudimentary money-boxes (ΘΗΣΑΥΡΌΣ) which were made similar in form