In most places since the beginning of what we recognize as time, Wealth has traditionally been measured in land ownership or territorialism. The more land you owned or controlled the wealthier you were. When you got enough land, you could start storing your wealth in precious metals, which evolves into coins.

Things start getting really interesting when you start adding things like artwork, heirlooms, and what about horses, pack animals, even human beings themselves. How much Wealth can one person gather in a life time?

So while Euro-asia economics arose, and humans began to compete over the gathering of wealth, over in a land now known as north america, every man was rich. How so? By recognizing that they did not own the grounds beneath their feet, Every man man owned everything and everything owned him; thus equality of the individual was established at least economically and is not this one of the goals of an evolved society?

Today's wealth can be so much more fleeting, people are holding their wealth in money that basically only exists on paper. Not true? Stocks bonds, options, futures, commodities, even currencies...
Money from nothing? Take a look at the dot.com boom / bust. Hundreds of thousands of small businesses with little or no start up costs Thousands of people have been made theoretically rich off internet stocks, essentially, a business or entity that often only exists in a different dimension, just to watch it disappear even faster than it appeared or slowly pissed away. In the end it's like most of them never existed, so did the wealth associated with them ever exist? Yes, Even if just for a second. The people who held on to that wealth were the ones who sold their ideas to others. A small group of companies like google, yahoo, and all the rest survived to be the pillars of what we now call the interent.