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100 Invention of Coinage and Monetization of Ancient Greece guarantee, though the guarantee could at first indicate no more than “this is gold from so-and-so’s shop.” Such parallels as can be found would seem to indicate that the earliest stamps were private indications of ownership that were understood by those who dealt with it to indicate the quality of the metal; eventually, however, the royal lion indicates that the palace stood behind the currency, whether or not it was directly involved in its minting.38 Whatever their antecedents and whatever the motive behind their minting , the first coins were surely an innovation. They were not a mere extension of the kind of stamp that may have adorned the ingots of the temple at Arbela. The temple had stamped ingots of a pound or more, whereas the heaviest coins of Asia Minor weighed no more than half an ounce. The coins of the earliest datable hoard came in no fewer than eight denominations, from halves to ninety-sixths of a Milesian stater. The motivation behind the “cutting” (to use the Greek term for what we call “striking”) of such coins must have been quite different from the motivation of the temple of Arbela in casting its ingots. Ingots of a pound or so are a convenient way in which to store silver, and they were probably made for that purpose. Small and minutely subdivided weights of electrum, however, were undoubtedly made for payment, not for storage. For what sort of payment? Perhaps indeed for payment to the state, but retail trade must have been present in the background, as Herodotus states.39 When I stated that retail trade was not likely to have been what brought about the invention, I said so because for the most common forms of retail trade, electrum coins were not useful; they were too valuable. For those larger-value trades where electrum would be used, however, coins solved a problem that surely came up in commerce as much as anywhere else. The first coins probably changed hands by weight; Head’s idea, rarely quoted, that the smallest denominations were designed as makeweights to bring a scale into balance, remains the most probable explanation.40 The coins must have been popular, for they continued to be produced in Lydia and even imitated in Lydia’s Ionian neighbor cities. It is not as clear, however, that they succeeded in standardizing the value of electrum. Croesus, the last king of Lydia, eventually ended the electrum issue and began to mint coins of silver and of gold. The process used, as uncovered in the Sardis excavations, involved technology that was not new but that had previously 38. Holloway; Furtwängler. 39. Hdt. 1.94.1. 40. Head in Hogarth, Ephesus, 88. The First Coins 101 been used only to burnish the surface of naturally occurring metal. It was probably the need to give the coins a reliable fixed value that led the Lydians to refine their metal throughout, producing coins of solid gold and of solid silver, whose value would withstand a tester’s chisel.41 For all that, it was not in Lydia that coins were to find their future. They may have had a considerable effect on the economy and society of the Lydians, but we have no way of knowing that. In 546 B.C.E ., Cyrus of Persia defeated Croesus, and the Lydian kingdom disappeared forever.42 The life of its people, whatever it may have been like, has been covered by the ages. T H E S P I T S O F P H E I D O N O F A R G O S The earliest hoards contained electrum coins apparently issued by the Greek cities who were neighbors and subjects of the kings of Lydia. The idea of coinage seems at first to have been a local phenomenon, restricted to the west coast of Asia Minor; but that soon changed. The Etymologicum Magnum, a compilation of a twelfth-century antiquarian , includes the following brief account. Pheidon of Argos was the first of all people who coined money, in Aegina; and giving the coins and taking the spits in return, he dedicated them to Hera of Argos.43 The excavators of the Heraeum at Argos had the good fortune to come upon one of those thrilling but dubious discoveries, a find that seems to match an otherwise uncertain story. They found a large bundle of iron spits and a...

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