THE RISE OF SILVER COINAGE

Why was money invented? The question is seldom asked nowadays because money is all-pervasive in modern developed economies, but this was not always the case.

The traditional answer to why money was invented is based on Aristotle's contention in his Nicomachean Ethics that it was a development from barter, leading to his oft-quoted formulation that ‘money is the measure of everything'. In other words, money was useful because it was a universal denominator but also, it was a virtually imperishable, easily portable, readily exchangeable store of wealth.

A sophisticated ‘commodity exchange' was used in the great Eastern and Egyptian empires in which silver was valued against wheat, dates, figs, olives, copper, gold and other commodities. Silver was extracted in Western Asia from the fourth millennium BCE and used extensively in the form of Hacksilber (lumps of silver, often chopped up jewellery). There is an argument in the literature as to whether this constituted a form of proto money, but thorough investigation of Hacksilber hoards in the southern Levant combined with elemental compositional analysis has shown that the weights and composition of the silver are too variable to have been used as coinage.

The earliest coins were minted in Lydia around the end of the seventh century BCE dated by their find in a foundation deposit under the Temple of Artemis at Ephesos (the so-called ‘Artemision Hoard'). The attribution of the invention to the Lydians comes from Herodotus 1.94, but the use of money was closely followed by local Greek Ionian cities along the coast of western Asia Minor including Miletos, Teos and Phokaia. The coins were minted in electrum which is a mixture of gold and silver. Until recently, electrum was believed to have occurred naturally in the form of nuggets found in the Pactolus River which flowed through Sardis, the Lydian capital, but this has been proved incorrect.

Electrum was manufactured to a recipe from its inception of 55% gold and 45% silver with minor amounts of copper. This regularized the composition of the earliest money and therefore its value, by state fiat. Arguably, when Greek city-states adopted coinage, they turned to pure silver because they lacked access to gold, but also because gold was intrinsically too valuable for everyday purchases. Even electrum coins were usually tiny with the smallest of them weighing only 0.08 g with a diameter of 2.5 mm (1/192 stater).

Silver was mined in modern Turkey and Iran. The Phoenicians developed trade all the way across the Western Mediterranean accessing silver from Sardinia and Spain. Silver ore could be found in many places in the Greek world most famously and extensively in Lavrion (Attica) and Thraco-Macedonia (Northern Greece) and in some of the Greek islands, albeit in lesser quantities.

 
Silver Drachma of Athens at the Numismatics Museum in Athens

To read the complete article, see:
The Rise of Silver Coinage in the Ancient Mediterranean (https://www.asor.org/anetoday/2021/12/rise-of-silver-coinage)

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