Josie posed some basic questions about ancient coins in CarlTromp's dictionary thread. I thought I'd answer them here, rather than hijack Carl's thread.
quote:
Originally posted by josie in this thread
In our times what are the countries little asia?
What is the oldest coin Know?in amululet form and coin with both images?
Which of the 2 have a coin first made little asia or greece?
Does roman have a first coin than celts?
"Little Asia" is presumably a reference to what in English we normally call Asia Minor, the geographic region comprising the western half of Turkey, and the offshore islands, which currently belong to Greece. In ancient times, "Greece" was larger and fuzzier than it is today; places like Sicily, Turkey, Cyprus, Cyrene (in Africa) and the Ukrainian Bosporus could all quite fairly have been considered "Greek places".
There is debate about whether the Greeks or Chinese "invented coins" first - the debate largely circles on interpretation of archaeological dating evidence and the definition of "coin". Certainly the Chinese invented the concept of making metallic objects intended solely for use as money, well before anyone in the West did (1000 BC and earlier); but these imitation cowrie shells, spades, knives and such were hardly "coins" by the modern definition.
The oldest known coins in the West were these (picture from
Wildwinds):
These were struck sometime around or before 650 BC by the kings of
Lydia, an ancient kingdom of Greek colonists in Asia Minor, centred on the city of Sardis.
You ask a question about the first coin "with both images". I assume you mean a coin with images on both obverse and reverse. The earliest coins had nothing on the back except the punch-mark made by the nail or whatever was used to hammer the coin into the die. it wasn't until a few generations later that they tried carving a pattern into the "nail", thus beginning the evolution of the reverse die. At first, patterns were simple: a plain square, a swastika-like pattern or the "windmill-sails" design, or sometimes an incuse, mirror-image of the obverse. By 500 BC, the use of "proper reverse dies" had become commonplace.
Your final question: who had coins first, the Romans or the Celts?
The Romans arrived relatively late on the coinage scene. Their earliest "coins" in the normal sense of the word were huge cast copper pieces called "aes grave". A one aes coin weighed a Roman pound (not much different to an Imperial pound of today)!
These commenced sometime around or before 270 BC.
The Celts were introduced to coinage much earlier; Celtic mercenaries serving in the army of Alexander the Great and his successors brought coins back with them. The earliest Celtic coins were copies of coins struck by Alexander or his father, Philip; these would have started somewhere between 340 and 270 BC in the Danube Valley and nearby areas (modern Romania and Bulgaria). As the Celts travelled and traded their way westwards, these copies were copied... and copied... and copied until the coins of the far western tribes, modern France and Britain, bear little resemblance to the original Greek coins.
So... looks like the Celts were "first", but not by much.
I hope this answers your questions satisfactorily.
Don't say "infinitely" when you mean "very"; otherwise, you'll have no word left when you want to talk about something really infinite. - C. S. Lewis
Posted 12/13/2006 10:53 am
