Hacksilver
fragments of cut and bent silver items used as currency
Hacksilver (sometimes referred to as hacksilber) consists of fragments of cut and bent silver items that were used as bullion or as currency by weight during the Bronze Age and Middle Ages.
Use
Hacksilver was common among the Norsemen or Vikings, as a result of both their raiding and trade. Hacksilver may also have been used by Romans in their dealings with Pictish tribes. The name of the ruble, the basic unit of modern Russian currency, is derived from the Russian verb рубить ('rubit'), meaning "to chop", from the practice of the Rus', described by Ahmad ibn Fadlan visiting the Volga Vikings in 922. An example of the related Viking weighing scale with weights was found on the Isle of Gigha. Hacksilver may be derived from silver tableware, Roman or Byzantine, church plate and silver objects such as reliquaries or book-covers, and jewellery from a range of areas. Hoards may typically include a mixture of hacksilver, coins, ingots and complete small pieces of jewellery.
Hoards of hacksilver are also well known in pre and post-coinage antiquity, in European and Near Eastern contexts. The Cisjordan Corpus (c. 1200–586 BC) is the largest identified concentration of pre-coinage hacksilver hoards, and provides key evidence for the Phoenician and wider Near Eastern roots of the development and proliferation of the earliest silver coinages in the Greek world and western tradition.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Hacksilver” as fragments of cut and bent silver items used as currency. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The subject matters to the general reference register because the source frames it as fragments of cut and bent silver items used as currency. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 9, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q980180. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1200.
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This entry incorporates text from “Hacksilver” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.