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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;Ed Snible, post: 3764294, member: 82322&quot;]Our goal is to call the coin by the same name it was called in ancient times.&nbsp; Often we don&#039;t know the name, but we use it when we do.</p><p><br /></p><p>We have the word &quot;stater&quot;, which comes from the same word in ancient Greek, and means literally &quot;that which sets, settles&quot;.&nbsp; &quot;Stater&quot; means the standard coin.</p><p><a href="https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/στατήρ#Ancient_Greek" target="_blank" class="externalLink ProxyLink" data-proxy-href="https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/στατήρ#Ancient_Greek" rel="nofollow">https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/στατήρ#Ancient_Greek</a></p><p><br /></p><p>When a coin writer says &quot;a gold X&quot; they may mean a gold coin with the weight of X, or they may mean a gold coin with the value of X.</p><p><br /></p><p>We have silver staters (think a &quot;colt&quot; of Corinth) and gold staters (think of Alexander&#039;s Athena/Nike gold coin).&nbsp; They don&#039;t have the same value, but the same weight.</p><p><br /></p><p>You will sometimes hear about special gold denominations like &quot;gold obol&quot; (Sicily) or &quot;gold octodrachm&quot; (Egypt).&nbsp; You will sometimes hear about special copper denominations like &quot;AE drachm&quot; or &quot;AE diobol&quot; (Egypt).&nbsp; I suspect these terms come from ancient Greek terms, but I am not certain.&nbsp; I intend to read <i>Testimonia Numaria: Greek and Latin Texts Concerning Ancient Greek Coinage</i> by John Melville Jones some day but there is never enough time.</p><p><br /></p><p>Sometimes no one knows the meaning of the ancient coin terms.&nbsp; An ancient market inscription says “1 Cyzicene = 11 Olbia silver staters”. That was the rule for money changers.&nbsp; A &quot;Cyzicene&quot; is the ancient name for the electrum stater of Cyzicus.&nbsp; But what was an “Olbia silver stater”?&nbsp; No one knows!&nbsp; Olbia doesn’t have any large silver coins.&nbsp; (I have a theory, as yet unwritten).[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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