TLDR: Just posted this .stl for 3d printing to Thingiverse at https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:5897427. The first coin I posted was of the Lydian Stater, for that see https://krypted.com/the-history-of-computing/lydian-stater-coin-design-for-3d-printing-and-why/. To continue our journey of the history of coins and why these matter:
The Lydian Lion coin was minted initially be the father of Croessius and then by Crosseus ihimself in the early years of the 500s BCE. Cyrus the Great introducd the concept of coinage in the Persian empire with the daric, after he defeated Coesus of Lydia some time after 546 BCE. By the end of the 500s and early 400s, two rulers later, Darius I defined that a gold coin would be of the same value as 20 silver coins. Thus the bimetallic standard was introduced to the Achaemenid Empire, where the daric flourished until Alexander the Great conquered persia in 330 BCE. He also conquered Egypt, who had used coins since around 500 BCE but began to mint gold staters around 360 BCE.
The Persians also set the standard that it was official governments who struck coins. Thus coins were one of many expressions of the power of the state. The Persians traded with the Babylonians, the Israelites, the Phoenicians, and the Greeks. Lydia had developed during the fall of the Hittites, who called the area Arzawa. They were mentioned by the Hebrews, some of whom claimed were desceded from a grandson of Noah when the world was divided up between his kin. The other nations embraced the coins, as the Babylonians minted coins after their fall to the Persians and the Greeks, with their colonies in Ionia, called theirs the stater and then the drachma.
The concept of a fixed weight of metal in trade was nothing new, having dated back centuries before the first coins were minted. In fact, the Phoenicians called their ingots the shekel and some claim those could have markings on them, or a seal that statedthe weight of the coin. The Hebrews adopted the shekel and their use goes back as far as mentions that appeared in the Code of Hammurabi from around 1,800 BCE.
The Hebrews were eventually conquered by the Babylonians, who were conquered by the Persians. Thus the daric is mentioned as the adarkonim in their bible. Those coins could buy goods, troops, and so coercian. The Greek coins began to be minted in the Greek colonies of Magna Graecia, or southern Italy in the 500s BCE. The practice spread, with the Celts minting coins in the fourth century, often based on ideas borrowed from nearby Greek colonies. The practice spread to modern Britain with the Celts, where coins were adorned with horses, boars, and wheat. The Celts spread coins to modern Northern Italy, France, across the Alps and into the modern Czech Republick Poland, Bavaria, and Slovakia. The Celts often added the name of rulers the coins they cast.
After Alexander, the Greek empires fragmented and the Alexanders, or coins minted with his visage would be used in trade for centuries. Each of his generals, the Diadochi, carved up his empire. Cassander ruled in Macedonia, where he minted coins with the head of Herakles. Lysimachus ruled in Thrace, where he deified Alexander and minted coins with Alexander’s face. Seleucus ruled in Mesopotamia and Persia, where he used the head of Heracles and images of Zeus on his coins. Ptolemy I Soter took over the Levant and Egypt, where he used Alexander’s likeness along with images of gods and heroes. The coins were emblematic of the divine right to rule and a reminder of how lands were conquered. New empires rose in the wake of the disruption caused by Alexander. Some, outside the sphere of Roman influence, like the Aksumites under king Endubis, introduced their own coins in the third century. Others, were within Greek influence but would build empires far larger.
The Romans benefited from trade with Magna Graeca. They had traded with bullion and ingots, similar to how the Phoenicians did, which they called the Aes Signatum. They minted their first real coins, which they referred to as nummus aureus. Their gold coin, the denarius aureus, was equal to 25 silver denarii, and had bronze asses and later the sestertius, as a third type of coin. Rome experienced high levels of inflation, so it made sense. They conquered vast lands and spread their specific system where they went, replacing previous types of coins. Those evolved during the rise of the Roman empire and began to be regularly minted in the first century BCE and were replaced by the solidus in the fourth century CE by Constantine.Rome was sacked by the Visigoths, led by a king named Alaric in 410 CE. By then, the capital had moved to Milan, then called Mediolanum in 286 and to Ravenna in 402 CE.
During the Roman empire, the iconography of coins had changed. The Greeks had adorned coins with images important to specific cities. Athens, for example, struck coins with the image of Athena, the patron goddess. Other cities might use fish, other animials, natural resources the city traded in, etc. The first Roman coins were similar, until Julius Caeser became the Roman leader to adorn coins with his image. Augustus became the first real emperor of Rome and did the same. The images had become a became a means to convey propaganda and the natural evolution was to prove the right to rule. Some, like Sextus, used images of his father, Pompey, to strengthen ties to the previous ruler and thus their own claim to power. Christianity became the official religion of Rome ten years after 313 CE, when the emperor Constantine issued the Edict of Milan, which officially sanctioned the religion. After that, Christian iconography began to share space on Roman coins with the images of rulers.
The empire became unstable by the 400s. The period from 300 CE to 700 CE is now considered the Migration Period (although the start and finish is debatable). Borders between empires have always been porous, but Alans, Huns, Slavs, Goths, Franks, and others were on the move, often displaced due to conquests of the Romans or neighboring tribes. As the Migration Period began during the fall of the Roman Empire, the Germanic tribes began to mint their own coins when the supply of Roman coins began to decline. The Visigoths settled in southern Gaul in 418 and somewhere between two and 20 years later began to mint coins that resembled those of Honorius, the Roman emperor at the time that Rome was sacked.
The Visigoths were pushed into Hispania by the Franks in the early 500s. The early Franks established city-states and minted coins similar to the Roman coins. By the time of Chlotar, a Frankish king in the early 500s, they minted coins with images like eagles. He was conquered by Theudebert, who rather than imitate the Byzantine coins, struck coins with his own image on them. The Byzantines had been divine rulers and while far away from the lands of Gaul and Hispania, still had influence in coins. By the late 600s, the amount of gold in coins had fallen and so Latin denarius had been replaced by the more Francophile silver deniers. Those were more pure and about 40 would buy a gold solidus. Charlemagne became king of the Franks in 768 and continued the overhaul of the financial systems begun by his father Pippin the Younger. They made the right to mint coins a royal privilege and established the Carolingian pound, a standard weight and measurement. Each pound of silver would be split into 240 denarii, now denier. That practice spread to England, who hadn’t minted coins after the Romans withdrew, as the pfenning and then schilling, and to Vienna and the Dutch as the Mark. These were all within a gram of one another.
Not all empires flourished for too long. The Gepids in modern Romania, Hungary, and Serbia, were absorbed into the Huns. They had minted their own coins towards the end of the 400s and early 500s. As Rome had contracted, Syagrius was a general who ran a small empire they called the Kingdom of the Romans in the late 400s. They too would mint Roman coins (although they were effectively a rump state of the Roman emprie) but in Syagrius’ name. They fell to the Franks, which effectively doubled the size of the Frankish kingdom. The Visigoths had been pushed south into Hispania, where they continued to copy Roman and then Byzantine coins as well. By the time King Liuvigild ruled Hispania, the Visigoths ruled much of modern Spain and Portugal, from 568 to 586. He minted coins with his image, which subsequent rulers did until the Umayyad’s conquered the Iberian Peninsula from 711 to 718. The Ostrogoths ruled parts of Italy and minted coins with rulers like Odoacer and then Theodoric the Great in the 400s, until Justinian conquered their lands (which were then conquered by the Lombards. The Lombards were Germanic peoples who settled in modern Italy during the fall of the Roman empire. They established titles and so coins but their rule was ended when Charlemagne conquered them in 774.
The next few decades saw what we can consider midieval proto-states born. Charlemagne united the Frankish tribes and went on the conquest. He pushed down towards modern Spain but stopped when he encountered the Islamic forces. He pushed north to Bavaria and Saxony, east towards the Byzantines, and South through the Italian peninsula past Rome. He named himself Holy Roman Emperor. After his death, the split of th kingdom into east and west established the boundaries somewhat still used in modern France and Germany. He pushed north as well, where he encountered the Scandanavians.
Scandanavia was populated by peoples we think of as the vikings, today. The vikings became a force to be reckoned with and began to settle other lands, much as the Greeks had colonized before them, they spread coinage where they went. There were pennings struck in the 800s, but Harald Bluetooth introduced the korsmønter in the late 10th century. King Olof Skottkonung minted the first Swedish coins around 995.
Not all lands needed their own coins, or at least at first. The Varangian viking conquerors established the Rurikid dynasty in the 9th century when Rurik rose to power and established a dynasty of kings. They waged many smaller wars against the Byzantines and often used Byzantine money or furs as a form of currency. Rurik’s descendants introduced coins into the Rus empire, which by then was the eastern frontier of Europe – and every nation between what would evolve into Russia and the Atlantic to the east had coins in the style of the Lydians, Greeks, Persians, Romans, and Byzantines. The Ottomans finally captured Constantinople in 1453 and Byzantium, the last vestige of the Roman empire fell to the most powerful of the Islamic empires, where it remained into the modern era.
The Islamic empires that arose from 600 CE replaced images of divine figures with quotes from the Qur’an. Those spread as the Mongols became Islamized, as in the case of the Persian Mughals, who spread those types of coins into India. The gold dinar was issued between 696 and 697 CE by the 5th Ummayad Caliph, Abd al-Malik ibn Marwan. The Islamic coins were loosely based on Sassanian, a few decades earlier, likely minted by Ali. Those had weight based on Byzantine coins and a new kind of religious iconography as they evolved into the dinar. The Abbasid and Ayyubid caliphates followed suit, and by 1,400s CE, Mehmed the Conqueror issued the first Ottoman gold coins.
Each regime in pockets of the Indian subcontinent has had their own types of coins, with varying degrees of complexity and types of iconography dating back to the pre-Mauryan Empire when they spread from Greek and Persion influences. Before that there were stamped ingots and other standard weights used in northern India, and the coins pushed south in the region over time.
China had imitation shells used as a form of currency as far back as an estimated 700 BCE. Those were used for ceremonial exchanges. Knife money, or knife-shaped money began to be used in China in the centuries after 600 BCE. Spade money, or money that physically resembles a spade, began use some time after 640 BCE, which actually makes it far older than the stater, but it’s theorized they were used for funerary purposes and not yet as actual currency. Early round coins were introduced in the Zhou period, likely around 350 BCE, although those in the final years of the Qing still looked somewhat similar to the first coins over 2,500 years ago. However, in the meantime, after he established the unified Mongol Empire, Chinggis Khan released the Sukhes, or gold and silver coins. Then in 1227, his regime added the first state-backed paper money, or banknote. This had evolved since merchants used paper as a receipt of deposit in the 7th century during the Tang dynasty and Islamic explorers had noticed cloth-based receipts had been used in 960. Within a few decades began to be introduced into Europe.
The Chinese influenced the use of coins throughout the rest of asia as well. 960 CE was around the time Vietnam issued cash coins, which resembled the Chinese coins. Korea also had knife coins as far back as the 3rd century BCE and thought to have been brought by Chinese settlers. They began to issue cash coins from 108 BCE. Japan introduced the Fuhonsen in 708 CE, based on previous Chinese coins. Progress is hard. The Mongols had printed bank notes that were initially rejected by the public, an innovation they seem to have picked up from the Chinese. By the late 1,200s CE the Ilkhanate ruler Gaykhatu ordered the population to use them; they did not. A Sultan in Azerbaijan was even killed as a reaction to a similar order.
The move from barter to cash-based economies allowed for simpler taxation, increased standardization, and more consistent trade. The banknotes further obfuscated the concept of wealth and the next major reform to the financial system came when banks began to trade through central banks in the 1600s and then when permanent banknotes began to be used as currency in the 1700s, a practce that spread as central banks issued paper money as legal tender in the 1800s – with the gold standard forming the basis for global exchange from the 1870s to the 1920s – and fiat money replacing that afterwards. It’s impossible with the current information to say for sure that Chinese spade coins or stamped Indian ingots didn’t influence the first Lydians coins. Nor is it possible to prove the impact of the stater, daric, or other coins on one another. Yet there are trends we see, and clear influences. The iconography has changed over the centuries, but there’s still plenty of symbolism, often used to define the divine right of a nation to exist. Democracies tend to revere
