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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;Reid Goldsborough, post: 22501, member: 34&quot;]Good post, except your &quot;we&quot; doesn&#039;t conform to any known &quot;we&quot; when it comes to the purpose of the first coinage. It&#039;s not true that &quot;Today, we believe that coins were invented specifically as bonus payments to mercenaries.&quot; Payment to mercenaries is just one of many possible reasons for the marking of uniform electrum dumps with types by a ruling authority, signifying the first &quot;coin.&quot;</p><p><br /></p><p>Among the other possible reasons that numismatists in the literature have proposed are religious offerings, gifts as part of treaty ceremonies, wedding presents, hospitality offerings, and tax payments, emphasis on &quot;proposed.&quot; This is all educated speculation. There&#039;s no contemporaneous documentation regarding the reason coins came into existence, and the archeological evidence is inconclusive as well. As such there&#039;s no consensus, no &quot;we,&quot; regarding this issue anyway. You would have been on more accurate ground if you had stuck to your first statement: &quot;We don&#039;t know why coins were invented.&quot;</p><p><br /></p><p>What we do know is that coins were *not* invented for trade or commerce. That&#039;s a widespread misconception, the lifting of a later benefit of coinage and placing it on the first coinage, a misconception that Plato and Aristotle (writing about two centuries after the fact) were guilty of, among others. The earliest coins have been conspicuously absent from archeological finds in the marketplaces of their time (bullion pieces have been found there -- bullion was still being used for commerce during the time the earliest coins came into being). And the earliest coins haven&#039;t been found in hoards outside where they were minted, indicating they weren&#039;t being used for trade (bullion was still being used here as well).</p><p><br /></p><p>There&#039;s more support for a &quot;we&quot; regarding Lydia as being the source of the first coinage, but here too there&#039;s far from universal agreement.</p><p><br /></p><p>Ephesos, as are the other Greek coastal cities of Asia Minor, is an interesting place, and these are interesting coins.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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