The Piggy Bank: A 2,000-Year History of Smashing Our Savings

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The traditional piggy bank asks a child to protect and feed a ceramic animal for months and then destroy it with a hammer. That paradox is the point. Collectors call it a still bank, a vessel with no moving parts where money goes in through a slot without effort and comes out only by sacrifice. This episode treats it as an ancient commitment device, the same trick as freezing a credit card in a block of ice, built to override a brain that evolved to consume resources on the spot.

The story begins long before the pig. The oldest known Western money box, from the Greek colony of Priene in the second century BC, is a miniature terracotta temple with a coin slit in the pediment. From there the trail runs through Pompeii and Herculaneum, Song dynasty China, medieval Bruges, and Tudor England, then turns to Java and Germany, where two cultures separately decided that savings should look like a pig.

Temples were the vaults of ancient cities, so a temple-shaped box borrowed divine security. Breaking it open meant a small act of sacrilege.
A large cache of boar-shaped banks was found at Trowulan in East Java, believed to be the capital of the Majapahit Empire, where copper cash coins needed a home.
In Javanese, celengan means likeness of a wild boar. The same word still means both the clay bank and the act of saving in modern Indonesian.
The earliest known German piggy bank dates to the 13th century and was found in Thuringia, where a pig fed on scraps was a peasant family's living savings account.
The popular tale about orange pygg clay has no evidence behind it. The Oxford English Dictionary first records pig bank in 1902 and piggy bank in 1913.

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