Upvote:5
This question is unanswerable:
1) Silver is not a useful measure on the scale required: money did not exist to purchase commodities for most of the desired time scale
2) Adequate wage/price series only become available in the mid 19th century, inadequate wage/price series only become available in the early 19th century
2a) Wage/price series are important because silver itself has a price, as discovered in the 19th century by a variety of political economics, Ricardo obviously, Marx gives a useful snapshot of the debate in Grundriesse's chapter on money. To establish some measure of stability, time series are constructed out of measures that appear to have some value over time: %GDP, GDP/capita, or "consumption bundles." Consumption bundles come down to wages through the relatively stable assumptions: workers consume their entire wages immediately or in deferred forms, the social expectations of waged consumption represent a social measure of "acceptable" living. Consumption bundles then give reference to prices in terms of a reflection on the socially accepted standard of living for people who worked for a living. This is fairly useful in that dietary habits don't actually change during crises (Hammond and Hammond's labourers series on the bread / oatmeal / potato consumption habits), which means that price rises in bread become apparent. Not useful in terms of dealing with fiat money, because again, our 19th century political economist friends identified that the paper money supply is a capital, not a domestic wage labourer, consumed commodity.
3) Bread was not bought for money for the vast majority of humanity through-out history, which gives a "no sensible answer" result