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By Root 2780 0

’ve all grown so accustomed to using little round pieces of metal to buy things that it’s easy to forget that coins arrived quite late in the history of the world. For more than 2,000 years states ran complex economies and international trading networks without a coin to hand. The Egyptians, for example, used a sophisticated system that measured value against standard weights of copper and gold. But as new states and new ways of organizing trade emerged, coinage began to make an appearance. Fascinatingly, it happened independently in two different parts of the world at almost the same time. The Chinese began using miniature spades and knives in very much the same way that we would now use coins, and virtually simultaneously in the Mediterranean world the Lydians started making actual coins as we would still recognize them – round shapes in precious metals.

These early Lydian coins come in many different sizes, from about the scale of a modern British 1p piece right down to something hardly bigger than a lentil. Lydian coins are not all the same shape. The largest one here is a kind of figure-of-eight shape – an oblong, slightly squeezed in the middle – and on it are a lion and a bull facing each other as if in combat, and about to crash together head-on.

These coins were minted under Croesus around 550 BC. It’s said that Croesus found his gold in the river that once belonged to the legendary Midas – he of ‘the golden touch’ – and it’s certain that the region was rich in gold, which would have been extremely useful in the great trading metropolis of Lydia’s capital city, Sardis, in north-west Turkey.

In small societies there isn’t really a great need for money. You can generally trust your friends and neighbours to return any labour, food or goods in kind. The need for money, as we understand it, grows when you are dealing with strangers you may never see again and can’t necessarily trust – that is, when you’re trading in a cosmopolitan city like Sardis.

Before the first Lydian coins, payments were made mostly in precious metal – effectively just lumps of gold and silver. It didn’t really matter what shape the metal was, just how much it weighed and how pure it was. But there is a difficulty. In their natural state, gold and silver are often found mixed with each other and, indeed, mixed with other less valuable metals. Checking a metal’s purity was a tedious task, likely to hold up every business transaction. Even once the Lydians and their neighbours had invented coinage, about a hundred years before Croesus, this problem of purity still remained. They used the naturally occurring mixture of gold and silver, not the pure forms of the metals. How could you know exactly what a particular coin was made of and therefore what it was worth?

The Lydians eventually solved this problem, speeded up the market and, in the process, became hugely rich. They realized that the answer was for the state to mint coins of pure gold and pure silver, of consistent weights that would have absolutely reliable value. If the state guaranteed it, this would be a currency that you could trust completely and, without any checking, spend or accept without a qualm. How did the Lydians manage to pull this off? Dr Paul Craddock, an expert in historical metals, explains:

The Lydians hit on the idea of the state, or the king, issuing standard weights and standard purity. The stamps on them are the guarantee of the weight and the purity. If you’re guaranteeing the purity, then it is absolutely necessary that you have the ability not just to add elements to the gold but also to take them out. To some degree, taking out elements like lead and copper is not too bad; but unfortunately the main element that came with the gold out of the ground was silver, and this had not been done before. Silver is reasonably resistant to chemical attack, and gold is very resistant to chemical attack. They took either a very fine powder of the gold straight from the mines, or else got bigger pieces of old gold hammered out into very thin sheets and put these in a pot