How it began
Coinage began in the kingdom of Lydia, in what is now western Turkey, in the seventh century BCE. The Greek writers Xenophanes of Colophon and Herodotus both credited the Lydians with it, and the coins support them: some of the earliest pieces carry Lydian names in the Lydian alphabet. The oldest securely placed group is 93 electrum coins found in 1904 and 1905 under the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus, left as offerings in the latter part of the seventh century BCE. Lion-head coins inscribed WALWET are linked to King Alyattes, who ruled from about 610 to 560 BCE.
Before it existed
Lydia was rich in electrum, a natural alloy of gold and silver that was panned and dug from the Pactolus River and other streams. Nuggets, weighed ingots and bags of electrum dust were used for payments. The trouble was that the share of gold varied from piece to piece in nature, and could be lowered on purpose by adding refined silver. Every payment therefore meant weighing the metal and testing its fineness, which made electrum a poor means of exchange.
How it works
A coin is a small ingot of fixed weight stamped with the mark of the authority that issued it. The stamp set and guaranteed the value, so the piece could change hands at once without being weighed or tested. The earliest examples from Ephesus include plain electrum pieces marked only with a square punch. Later ones carry a symbol on the upper face, such as the Lydian lion head, the seal of Phocaea or the stag of Ephesus, with rough punched squares on the underside.
How it spread
Greek cities on the coast of Asia Minor, including Phocaea and Ephesus, struck electrum coins of their own early on. Around the middle of the sixth century BCE King Croesus called in the electrum pieces and replaced them with separate coins of pure gold and pure silver, known as Croeseids, and the gold ones became a trade currency across the Aegean. After Cyrus the Great took Lydia in the 540s BCE, the Sardis mint kept striking the lion and bull type for about 30 years under Persian rule.
What lasted
The Lydian idea moved the guarantee of value from the metal itself to the issuing authority, and that principle outlasted the kingdom. Around 515 BCE the Persian king Darius I replaced the lion and bull design with royal Persian imagery and issued the gold daric and the silver siglos from the same tradition. Under the Persians the gold stater weighed 8.06 grams and the silver siglos 5.35 grams, with twenty sigloi to one gold stater.
