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.
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