Lydia or Aegina? Two Accounts of the First Coins

Mystery of the Month: Who Made the First Coins?

1Welcome back to the Tri-County Coin Club newsletter. This month's mystery comes from ancient Greece: who made the very first coins? Two ancient writers give different answers. Before you judge them, here is how people paid for things before coins.

2For thousands of years, most people traded by barter, swapping one good for another. Many also counted value in cattle. In Homer's Iliad, a Greek poem composed about 700 BCE, one warrior trades his gold armor, worth 100 oxen, for another's bronze armor, worth only 9 oxen. An ox makes a handy measure of value for something large. For a jar of olive oil or a pair of sandals, it is far less handy.

3Traders in Egypt, Mesopotamia and Greece also paid with metal: rings, bars and scraps of silver or bronze, weighed on a scale for every sale. Later Greeks remembered that iron roasting spits had once been handed over as payment. Their small coin, the obol, took its name from the Greek word for a spit, and the drachma, a larger coin, meant a handful.

4A coin is different. It is a piece of metal of a set weight, stamped with a mark by a ruler or a city that stands behind its value. Once coins existed, they traveled with traders. Greek cities around the Aegean Sea began to stamp their own, each with its own symbol: a sea turtle for Aegina, an island trading city near Athens, and an owl for Athens. After Persia conquered Lydia in 546 BCE, Persian kings began minting gold coins of their own. Greek traders carried coins to Greek colonies in Italy, Sicily and around the Black Sea, and those cities soon minted coins too.

5Far to the east, people in China made bronze coins shaped like small spades and knives in some of the same centuries. Historians think China came up with coins on its own.