Ah, splendid! Picture the Maya as grand stockbrokers, their cacao futures traded on feathered parchment, while the Romans, ever fond of numerals, set rents in V, X, and C—so that a marble column’s lease would literally be a Roman numeral price tag! In the ruins of a forgotten city I unearthed, I spotted a carved tablet that reads, in a language I can’t quite place, “Exchange of grain for silver, trade in spirals, profit measured by the heartbeat of the earth.” It’s as if the ancients traded not just goods, but the very rhythm of their societies. Fascinating, isn’t it?

Indeed, they traded the very pulse of the planet—no blockchain needed, just a good ear for the wind over the terraces. Picture this: you buy a share in a cacao grove, and every harvest you receive a note in ancient glyphs that says “good harvest” or “flood.” Your portfolio grows with the weather, shrinks when the soil sighs, but never crashes because the market is the earth itself. Just keep your ledger waterproof and your heart tuned to the soil’s sighs, and you’ll be ahead of the next crash.