Coins made in ancient times and collected since then

Alan Walker of Nomos wrote an email advertising Auction 37 with observations about collecting
https://nomosag.com/auction
I thought it was interesting and asked him if I could post his observations here. He said yes and here they are:

How many coins were made in ancient times? Or, to narrow it down a little, how many coins were minted in the geographic area ranging from Asia Minor, through the Middle East including Persia, down to Egypt and North Africa, up through to Celtic Europe and the Greek and Roman World; and all this from the later 7th century BC until the fall of the Roman Empire in the West in 476. Let's say 1200 years in total. There have been numerous attempts at discovering how many coins could be struck from a single die pair - including the actual engraving of a pair of dies for an Aeginetan Stater and using them to produce some 10,000 silver coins of the appropriate size and weight - but there are so many variants and caveats (especially the metal hardness: the dies used for gold, silver or bronze coins would have differing lifetimes) that a truly accurate estimate would be most difficult. But thanks to the work of numismatists, metallurgists, statisticians - with a special mention of the distinguished Belgian scholar François de Callataÿ - we can be pretty certain that over 1 Billion (i.e., 1000 x 1 million) coins had been produced during this period. And very probably considerably well over 1 billion. So where did they all go?

While there certainly were scholarly and eccentric and wealthy individuals in antiquity who owned some 'old coins' that they kept as curios, rather than as current money, and there may well have been accumulations/'collections' of coins held in temple treasuries (old donations that still appeared in the inventories) or by mints ('reference collections' so to say; thus the occasional reuse of what were then 'antique' coin types, taken from coins that had been minted several centuries earlier), actual collecting in a modern sense really only began with the late Middle Ages and early Renaissance when intellectuals used coins to illustrate the past that was then being rediscovered (there was a Middle Byzantine Empress who actually kept a box of "darics", but she was clearly an exception). In the 14th century Petrarch acquired 'ancient' coins as a way of displaying the virtues of Roman emperors for his contemporaries to emulate (a perfect introduction to this subject is E.E. Clain-Stefanelli's Numismatics - and Ancient Science. A Survey of its History. Washington, DC, 1968). Soon enough, the collecting, studying and writing about coins of the ancient Romans - the 'ancestors' the Italian Renaissance writers who were the first major collectors were so proud of - became an essential part of aristocratic cultural life; and it soon spread all over western Europe. In addition, trade contacts, first with the Byzantine and then the Islamic world, as well as finds from Sicily and southern Italy, meant that more and more 'exotic' Greek coins also became known (see J. Cunnally's Irritamenta - Numismatic Treasures of a Renaissance Collector. ANSNS 31. New York, 2016). This also meant that coin collections became more and more common, both for noble rulers - whose personal collections, overseen by cultured officials, often, over the succeeding centuries, were turned into the state collections of today - and private individuals (scholars, merchants, bankers), many of whom gifted their coins to local institutions, where some of them remain to this day (the Venetian Apostolo Zeno, 1668-1750, was a perfect example - famed as a librettist and poet at the Hapsburg court in Vienna, his collection went to the Monastery of St. Florian in Upper Austria in 1747, from which it was sold in 1955-1957).

But the fact is, for more than 2000 years, from when coins were first invented until at least the 15th century, when coins were found the only interest their finders had in them was their metal value. The idea of retaining them in museums for study would have been considered sheer lunacy! It is only when coins became desirable as objects in themselves and were of interest to scholars, collector-scholars and those intellectuals excited by the past that we can say numismatics as a field began. And, despite the ever increasing number of collectors, finds kept being destroyed. The enormous - some 80,000 pieces! - Brescello Hoard of late Republican and early Imperial Aurei was found in 1714, but while a good number ended up in collections, the vast, vast majority were melted down and made into contemporary coins! In 1819, in Casal Zurika/Casal Gudja on Malta, a number of amphorae filled with Roman 3rd century sestertii were found by a farmer. They ended up being sold for scrap to a bronze founder in Valetta from whom a collector, who saw them by chance, bought the remaining un-melted 1200-1300 coins (out of a total of some 15,000).

In other words, despite what many 'heritage defenders' have to say, without coin collectors and the great collections they formed and which now make up the great museum research collections of today, our numismatic knowledge would be negligible. And many of the coins now found in today's archaeological excavations would be more of a mystery than a help.