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Message:: [QUOTE="kaparthy, post: 3030944, member: 57463"]I tagged this as the Best Answer. The reason why this was best in my view is that in the Renaissance, there were also books about ancient coins for the first time.  I grant that hoards of old coins are known. But the hoarders had no scholarship in support of their collection. More to the point, it is true that if you own not a single coin, but have a library of books about them, then you are a true numismatist nonetheless. That was not possible before the Renaissance. Also, the 18th Century saw an explosion in classical scholarship that included the invention of philology as a result of the extensive knowledge of Greek and Latin. Thus, Gibbons' Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire supplemented knowledge that re-emerged when Plutarch's Lives was brought into new editions in the 1500s. Shakespeare drew heavily from them. None of that can be associated with clay pots of old coins, interesting though they are in their own right.[/QUOTE]