THE COIN COLLECTOR - World eBook Library

THE COLLECTOR SERIES
The original conception of coined money arose among
a people whose commercial prosperity needed such facili-
ties for exchange with distant countries, and who pos-
sessed the means, in rich gold-mines, of establishing a
metallic medium at once intelligible and convenient.
The introduction of the coinage, which is usually re-
garded as the basis of that of the Greeks, has to be
sought for outside the limits of Hellas and on another
continent ; and this circumstance involves the arrange-
ment of any book devoted to a survey of the subject
rather complicated and perplexing. As the Historia
Numorum is the standard work of reference, it was
judged best to obey the initiative or precedent there
given ; but the principle followed is not perfectly
clear or satisfactory, as Dr. Head not only places
Lydia near the conclusion of his volume, but com-
mences it with the Greek and Roman settlements in
Western Europe. The story of the invention of money
by the Lydians of the seventh century B.C. has been told
often enough to have become familiar to all. Whether
a specimen of the maiden mint exists we do not
know. It would be very difficult to determine the pre-
cise age of such a piece ;
but here was the Asiatic birth-
place of the Greek numismatic movement, which owed
nothing to its foreign founders save the happy idea of
converting to practical purposes the mineral resources
of Lydia. A very considerable interval must have
elapsed—two centuries or upward—before the Greeks
began to acquire the faculty of communicating to lumps
or discs of metal their impressions of natural objects
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