Yes.... and it was a terrible system, not having a money system with any sort of democratic political controls on its supply and demand. Through a modern lens, we should view the thousands of years of gold coin currency as a human system that was ripe to cause artificial limitations and excesses of resource availability for populations that participated in the system. With a time machine, we should advise people of the past that a much better (but still imperfect) system -- clay tablets with a list of creditors and debtors, with regular debt cancellations/easements as needed to maintain stability -- had already been invented, possibly thousands of years before the invention of coins.