Ancient coins make our own money

Offiongchar2les29

Greek Didrachm
Ancient Greek didrachm

The invention of coins is shrouded in mystery. Coins as we think of them today were first used as a method of payment around the 6th or 5th century BCE. According to the historian Herodotus, King Croesus of Lydia was “the first to strike and use coins of gold and silver.” But, Aristotle claimed that the first coins were minted by the wife of King Midas of Phrygia. We may never know which is true.

However, Lydian staters are widely considered to be the world’s oldest coins. They are made from electrum, a mixture of gold and silver. These early coins were minted around 600 BCE in the kingdom of Lydia in the modern-day country of Turkey. Lydian staters are important because they were the first coins in history to be officially issued by a government body. They were the model for virtually all other coinage.

Offiongchar2les29

Nice researched

Sapyx

No, it's generally accepted that Aristotle was wrong, and Herodotus mostly-right; Alyattes, the immediate predecessor of Croesus, was the first ruler to strike coins.

There was considerable debate in ancient times as to which city "invented coinage first", since several cities at the time were making such claims. The author Julius Pollux, writing circa AD 180, wrote of five different claimants:

Another example of local pride is the dispute about coinage, whether the first one to strike it was Pheidon of Argos, or Demodike of Kyme (who was wife of Midas the Phrygian and daughter of King Agammemnon of Kyme), or Erichthonios and Lycos of Athens, or the Lydians (as Xenophanes says) or the Naxians (as Anglosthenes thought).

Of course, it's entirely possible that one of the other cities is the "true inventor of coins", and the archaeological evidence to support the claim simply hasn't survived. The evidence for Alyattes is derived from archaeological excavations in Ephesus, which was under Lydian rule at the time but was not the actual mint-city of the Lydian empire.

Given that he smallest coin issued by Alyattes would have been the equivalent of a week's wages, these earliest coins weren't really intended to serve the common people in everyday commerce to buy their bread and olive oil. Such "small change" coins didn't come about until a few decades later, once people began to realise how gosh darn useful coins really were.

Nap

AI bot?