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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;Valentinian, post: 2586674, member: 44316&quot;]Most tiny silver coins are early, 4th C. BC and often earlier. When coins began, the were precious metal and had the value of the metal, perhaps with a small premium for being in coin form. The problem with coins having the value of precious metal is that gold and silver were very precious so one 4-gram silver coin was worth significantly more than a day&#039;s pay. If you wanted to buy something small, say, wine at a tavern, you couldn&#039;t make do with drachms, you needed smaller denominations. Even if coins began as a store of wealth or a way to make big payments, they became a way to buy small things. If you wanted something worth 1/20 of a day&#039;s pay, you would need a coin smaller than (1/20)4 = 0.20 grams, very small indeed, if the system is based solely on silver. </p><p><br /></p><p>Throughout antiquity, silver was worth about 100 times as much as the same weight of copper. Even though copper was not precious and therefore not suitable for coins, someone had the idea to use it anyway. Sometime before 400 BC copper coins appeared at nominal values. We have all seen the huge Egyptian Ptolemaic copper coins of more than 40 mm diameter and 60 grams or more. That was probably an attempt to make the copper in the coin worth what the coin was supposed to be worth, as a fraction of a silver denomination. But that attempt was replaced by copper currency not worth in metal what it was worth in theory. It was &quot;fiduciary&quot; coinage. So is your money today. The paper in a $20 bill is not worth $20, but the government and the person you pass it to agree it is worth $20. </p><p><br /></p><p>So, when coins were precious metal you needed very small coins for small transactions. Copper fiduciary coinage fixed that problem. Tiny silver coins disappeared. Larger copper coins replaced them. If you pay attention to the dates of the tiny silver coins in this thread, you will see they are quite early.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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