However economics does not explain how individual human beings and societies came to accept symbolic money as a medium of exchange or store of value. The process of according value to a symbol is psychological and social. Money is a social institution based on the consent of the population and a psychological symbol based on the consent of the individual.[1] Money has acquired the all-pervasive value that it possesses today by a slow evolutionary process that can be most easily understood by tracing its social and psychological origins from ancient times.