Numismatic Coin Club World Internet Numismatic Society
NEWSLETTER - LIBRARY ARCHIVE
HOME | NEWSLETTER | LIBRARY


Hard Cold History
by Ray Larson, WINS#20

The very first coins containing gold were made in western Asia Minor in the late eighth century BC. They were made from electrum, a naturally occurring alloy of gold and silver. The minting of pure gold and pure silver coins is generally attributed to the Lydian king Croesus (561-546 BC). Only the wealthiest areas minted gold coinage, most communities minted in silver because they simply did not have the gold available. The use of an accepted currency greatly expanded commerce, as you could imagine taking three goats to a bazaar would severely limit fair trading compared to coins that were acceptable by the majority of the people.

The Lydian empire, (546 BC) saw the rise of one of the greatest empires of the ancient world, the Achaemenid Persian empire. Because the use of coins was so much more feasible for any sized commercial transaction than simple bartering of goods and the Empires wide travels to do commercial activities, Persian words for typical items of trade became standardized throughout the Middle East and eventually entered the English language, some examples are, bazaar, shawl, sash, turquoise, tiara, orange, lemon, melon, peach, spinach, and asparagus. The Persian Empire ruled both militarily and economically for nearly two hundred years until they had the misfortune of coming up against Alexander the Great.

The word “mint” and its meaning come from the Temple of Juno Monetos, Rome, where coins were made as early as 269 BC. The Greeks and Romans used gold coinage very little, and the ones they used became debased as their empires declined. In the Middle Ages, silver was the standard coinage, but some gold coinage was still regularly minted in the Italian city states primarily for trade.

One of the reasons the Roman Empire lasted as long as it did was not just because of its large well trained armies, but because of trade and the fact that the Roman soldiers, when not at war, were busy improving roads and other things that improved the lives of the masses. In a later epoch, when private banks started issuing paper money, it could be noted that the further one got from the bank that issued the currency, the less it would purchase. This was never a problem with gold and silver, but it did force tradesmen to get very good at the measure of precious metals and why certain coins were more readily accepted because they had gained the reputation of always being of true weight.

With the discovery of the New World and its abundance of wealth in the form of precious metals, both silver and gold coinage minting was expanded greatly. In the present day of electronic fund transfers, credit cards and unbacked currency, an inquiring mind might want to notice that, even as the governments of the industrial world push us further away from a value backed wealth system, that they keep vast amounts of both gold and silver in their national vaults.

Copyright © Feb 1983 - January 2006; by the author.




TOP OF PAGE

Information contained on this page is posted for WINS Club Members use.
If you have any comments or problems with this or any other Club Site page,
please contact the: Operations Admin.

Copyright © 2000-2007 All Rights Reserved.        Legal Notices