When Did Coin Collecting Start?

The oldest known reference to people "collecting coins", and specifically to people paying more than face value to own a coin, is in Pliny the Elder's encyclopedic "Natural History", Volume 33 (the volume on Metallurgy and metals), Chapter 46, commenting on the methods of falsification of silver coins:


So the "first coin collectors known to history" were people buying a reference collection of fake denarii, to help them spot fake coins in circulation.

There are other references that imply at least an interest in and curiosity about old coins, if not "collecting" in the modern sense. Suetonius, in his history of the early Empire, "The Twelve Caesars", records of Emperor Augustus, Chapter 75:



Nevertheless, there have been a couple of coin hoards discovered that appear to have been assembled as "collections", rather than simply as piles of money: hoards with minimal duplication of types, with mixtures of local bronze coinages and with obsolete withdrawn coins mixed up with newer coins. SO it can indeed be assumed that coin collecting existed, but it certainly wasn't as common back then as it is today.

Part of the problem with "coin collecting" as a hobby in the ancient world is the lack of information about coins that would have been available to a collector in ancient times. These days, you can go into just about any bookstore in the Western World and find a coin catalogue for your own country's coins, and probably a Krause catalogue for the coins of other countries. But as far as we can tell, nobody in ancient times ever wrote a coin catalogue about the coins that they encountered. And governments wouldn't have issued proclamations about new coin releases; back then, the issuing of coinage was a form of public proclamation. Without information about what coins are available to collect, the best a "collector" could have aimed for is an accumulation.

Coin collecting did not become popular with the European nobility until after Petrarch wrote on the subject, at the beginning of the Renaissance. None of the great coin collections of Europe date back any earlier than the 1300s; even the Vatican coin collection wasn't started until pope Boniface VII (1294-1303).

In ancient China, on the other hand, coin collecting seems to have been far more popular with the middle classes for a much longer time period. There are historical references to coin catalogues being written as far back as 500 AD. The early mediaeval Tang Dynasty even produced what one could reasonably call "Proof NCLT coins": cash coins made from the same style moulds as normal coins, but more carefully written, and made of silver or gold rather than the usual bronze.

HHHMMMMmmm. Subject not covered in the Red Book at all.
I think one of the problems with finding out when coin collecting started is that the Coin Albums were made of materials that just rotted away. Picture a Coin Album made of wood. Or going into a bank a few thousand years ago and asking for rolls of coins.
And who is to say what type of coins the cave men used and if they collected them too.
Or just read what Sap wrote.