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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;Parthicus, post: 2737685, member: 81887&quot;]The usual definition I&#039;ve seen for coins is that &quot;ancient&quot; covers everything up to the end of the Western Roman Empire in AD 476, &quot;medieval&quot; covers from 476 up to the Renaissance around 1500, and &quot;modern&quot; is everything after that.</p><p><br /></p><p>Naturally, there are problems with this definition.&nbsp; Byzantine coins are usually considered ancient, and while some Byzantine coins were struck before 476 the last Byzantine coins weren&#039;t struck until 1453. Thus we have &quot;ancient&quot; Byzantine coins struck at the same time as &quot;medieval&quot; Western European coins.&nbsp; Also, the cutoff date for medieval to modern is rather arbitrary- the Renaissance was a process, not a single sudden event.&nbsp; 1500 is mostly just a nice, convenient round number.</p><p><br /></p><p>The situation gets more complicated if we move away from Europe.&nbsp; The early 7th century makes a convenient time to divide ancient and medieval for most of the Mideast and Asia:&nbsp; The spread of Islam introduced a new coinage style (along with a new form of culture) over a vast area, and the start of the Tang dynasty in 618 stabilized Chinese coins in the square-hole, 4-character format that would prevail for another 13 centuries.&nbsp; But neither the Islamic world nor China experienced an event akin to the Renaissance around 1500, so the medieval/modern split point is harder to decide.&nbsp; Steve Album, in his &quot;Checklist of Islamic Coins&quot;, ends his listings with the advent of modern machine-struck coinage, which in most of the Islamic world wasn&#039;t until the 19th century.&nbsp; China similarly continued the old coin method of casting square-holed bronze or brass coins until the very late 19th/early 20th century.</p><p><br /></p><p>TL,DR: It&#039;s complicated.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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