Some inventions or innovations had to wait some time before reaching actual success. In 1900, many of the few automobiles already circulating in Paris were electric cars, but it did not last: 10 years later, almost all cars in the streets had thermic engines, and the electric car technology would not make a significant coming back in the industry until a century later. Was it the same for coins? We had all been told that coinage was a Lydian-Ionian invention, that the first coins ever were minted in Lydia and Ephesus in the 7th c. BCE. But in 2018 two small c. 41.5 g silver ingots were published. They were stamped with a jug-shaped die bearing the hieroglyphic inscription: "Tutankhamon king of Heliopolis in Upper Egypt". See Michel Valloggia, 'Note sur deux lingots d’argent de Toutânkhamon', Revue d'Égyptologie 68 (2017-2018) p. 141-152. These ingots, property of a deceased Swiss collector, were allegedly from a hoard found in Lebanon. Michel Valloggia does not call them "coins", but it is obvious that in the 14th c. BCE the Egyptians cast small sized precious metal ingots and stamped them with dies bearing an inscription telling under which royal guarantee they have been issued (king Tutankhamon, c. 1345 - c. 1327 BCE). Isn't this precisely what the Lydians or the Ionians did seven centuries later in electrum, with dies representing a lion head or a grazing deer with the Greek inscription "Phanos emi sema", and we call it coin minting? The Tutankhamon ingots are called "monetary objects": if they are monetary, it means that they are a kind of money... Vallogia's paper was published in 2018 but, curiously, does not seem to have been much cited in literature since. One of the two ingots was auctioned in 2019 (Numismatica Genevensis SA, auction 12.101) with a starting price of CHF 30,000 and sold for 32,000, way too much if suspected to be a forgery but, if considered authentic, a rather moderate sum for such a rare, exceptional and historically important object. I do not understand why this discovery aroused so little enthusiasm. In the late 7th c. BCE the Lydian and Ionian stamped electrum ingots were a successful innovation because other ones of the same kind were minted soon after in more and more other places, and monetary economy eventually spread all over the Mediterranean. It had obviously not been the case in the 14th c. BCE for the Tutankhamon stamped silver ingots : an invention too much ahead of its time?
What differentiates stamped bullion from coins? I suspect these ingots were valued as bullion and intended for an international payment, whereas with coins the exchange value was (just a little) more than the intrinsic value from the start. So I would call the silver ingot a proto-coin. But really I haven’t read much about these interesting objects.
Interesting post, thanks. BTW, I remember my uncle having both an Electric Car and A Stanley Steamer in his garage. We never road in them but they were both operable and in great condition.
The ancient Chinese should also be considered. They initially used shells, then bronzed shells (coins), then knife and spade money. I'm no expert on the subject, but some scholars put knife money all the way back to 770 BC, which may have even been before the Lydians/Ionians.
Gonna read this one in the morning, just had a visit from the local Po Po's. Seems that no one has the ability to celebrate anymore. The one individual has what used to be a mass vote, you know against tattling, now we cry wolf unless someone is getting killed then they are late. I think that the police invented coins to give the patrons something to argue about. Give the Sherriff something to take when a crime was committed.
Did Egyptians invent the first coins? Not to be pedantic about it, but I think it depends on on how you define "coin" and how you define "invented". With respect to "invented", for example, there are other folks who potentially achieved powered flight before the Wright Brothers. But, once the Wright Brothers demonstrated powered flight, it was recognized, recorded, and stayed invented. There is a continuity of powered flight technology from the present day directly back to the Wright Brothers. So they get the credit for inventing it. This Egyptian object is very cool, and may meet your definition of a coin. But, as far as I know, it seems like a mostly one-off thing that didn't catch on. 700 years later the Lydians, presumably with no knowledge of these Egyptian pieces, independently invented coins. And from that point on coinage stayed invented; there is continuity of the technology right to the present day. So the Lydians get the credit.
I think these ancient Egyptian ingots qualify as coins. They were stamped, standardized and probably functioned as means of payment and/or stores of value, even if their use may have been very limited. In this sense they are very much like the much later Lydian or Greek stamped ingots/coins. I think what is different is that they have been recognized as such only recently and (as Savitale pointed out before ), there does not appear to be a continuity from these Eqyptian ingots to recognizable coinage. However, I think it is quite possible that precious metal ingot continued in use from the time of Tutankhamun to the the time of the Lydians (some 800 years) and that the latter just built on an Egyptian idea, which never really went away.
The difference for me would be standardized weights. Sure, royal seal would fit into the definition of government approved, that many similar ingots stamped by merchants or bankers would not carry. However, the one thing Lydian issues had versus many other examples of stamped bullion didn't was standardized weight or denomination. Besides purity guarantee and official issue, the third aspect to me which differentiate early coins from bullion is weight standard. A silver tetradrachm was accepted at face value do to amount of silver being predetermined. To me, absent demonstration of a monetary standard these were made into, and recognition of that standard by the public, this would be very interesting examples of proto-money. Lydia is where standard weight systems were in place. However, I am kind of weird about the early striated coinage. I consider it also proto-money, since I do not consider striations a mark of official sanction. I consider the issues immediately after that to be the first coins in the world, with a design the population recognized as coming from the king.
I agree that technically the fact that they were weighed out according to a fixed standard and stamped by an authority to declare value and validity would technically make them coins. I also agree that since probably only a few were ever made, and they were made once and then nobody ever stamped weights of gold or silver for at least 600-700 years would disqualify them as being the "invention of coinage" to the extent that the Lydians/Ionians successfully monetized their economy within the span of just a few decades, and such changes were permanent. Also the issue of Chinese coins is an intriguing one - early Chinese knives and spades were functional objects that were traded for the content of their metal, and at some point they stopped being functional and the people casting them began inscribing them with the mark of authority. When exactly this happened of course is a matter of heated debate. I've seen claims (mostly by -totally unbiased- Chinese sources) that the earliest knife and spade coins were being produced as early as 1,000 BC, and also claims that the inscriptions didn't appear until as late as 500-400 BC. Similarly contentious is the appearance of punchmarked silver in India within about a century of the earliest Anatolian coins.
First I've heard of them, very interesting. Assuming they're genuine, definitely somewhere on the proto-money spectrum. (I don't think you can really identify "the" first coin; it was a process, which stopped & started multiple times around the world, and objects can be more or less coin-like.) I imagine the relative lack of attention is due to the absence of context. Not just a "provenience" (which would help w/ authenticity concerns) but to know important things like: What were these used for (e.g., commerce, grave goods, religious offerings, a single contracted payment of silver)? How many were produced? (Hard to call them coins if there were only two.) * What was the weight distribution? (If there were bunch all weighing 41.5g or some multiple/ factor, then it starts to sound like a monetary unit/ coin.) In all the ways above, I actually think those weird bronze age European axe heads might have currently have the best claim to being the earliest (pre)coin, c. 2000 BCE. https://www.livescience.com/earliest-money-bronze-age.html
Actually it seems the earliest Ionian coins weren't even striated. See here: https://www.glebecoins.org/electrum/Early_Electrum/Basic_Electrum_Types/basic_electrum_types.html Ross G.
