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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;EWC3, post: 3309827, member: 93416&quot;]I tend to disagree, but in a rather complicated way.&nbsp; I would put it like this. Coins themselves were not difficult to invent.&nbsp; They are surely a very simple obvious idea.&nbsp; What was difficult to invent was a completely new way of arranging both politics and economics around competition, markets, retailing etc. It seems that did start to happen in Sardis around 615 BC or so. Coins were crucial to it.</p><p><br /></p><p>Michael Mitchiner published a coin catalogue in two volumes (<i>Ancient Trade and Early Empires</i> - 1400 A4 pages!) in 2004. His central argument was that there was only one place that this form of coin using government appeared, and that was Sardis. The idea had spread from there to India by c. 460 BC, from there to China by about 500 BC. But the idea itself never spread to Egypt, nor to the central provinces of Persia. (In those two empires it seems that goods continued to be distributed more by priests than by markets, in ways somewhat like that which 20th century communists aspired to).</p><p><br /></p><p>As brought out by this thread, the Egyptian issues even of the 350’s BC or so were probably not tied to the government’s internal policies, rather were just to sort out one-off payments to foreign mercenaries. Seems to me the priests of Persia and Egypt probably resisted the idea of coin use to the very end, and the change came only through conquest. (Perhaps even we could compare matters to 20th century events, that some political economies repeatedly do better than others?)</p><p><br /></p><p>This just a quick sketch of why I would be more willing to “look down on”, or anyhow, criticise, Ancient Egyptian polity. Note that my opinion on this is a minority view, but I am not alone in holding it – am happy to produce a reading list on this, for anyone interested…...</p><p><br /></p><p>Rob T[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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