561-546 BC Lydia Gold Third-Stater Struck Under King Croesus, NGC Gem Ms, 5/5

Amazing!

Here's your trivia of the day.

Although "the Greeks" are often credited as being "the civilization that invented coinage", neither Croesus nor his father Alyattes were actually Greek. The Lydian culture at the core of the Kingdom of Lydia was, ethnically and linguistically, more closely related to ancient Troy and the even-more-ancient Hittites than they were to Greek culture, though the Lydians had conquered numerous Greek-speaking cities before and during the reign of Croesus. The OP coin does not have an inscription, but if it did, the language on it would be Lydian, not Greek. While most pre-Persian Lydian coins are like the OP coin have have no inscriptions, there are a very, very few Lydian coins that actually do have Lydian inscriptions on them, such as the coin discussed in this article which has the Lydian word "WALWAT", which is believed to be the Lydian form of the Greek name "Alyattes".

After Lydia was conquered by the Persians, the Hellenization of Lydia continued apace, until the geographer Strabo (writing around 7 BC) records that the the Lydian peoples were now all speaking Greek, with the Lydian language only remembered in a few isolated towns and villages. The language is totally extinct today, and is only decipherable thanks to a bilingual Aramaic-Lydian gravestone found in the Sardis necropolis in 1912. Meanwhile, just as Greek culture had assimilated Lydian territory, Greek storytelling and mythology had thoroughly culturally appropriated Croesus and his kingdom as one of their own. To be "as rich as Croesus" was just as popular an ancient Greek saying as it is an English one.