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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;dougsmit, post: 786227, member: 19463&quot;]I&#039;ll accept the span suggested but the whole idea of collecting Greek coins is really faulted.&nbsp; Ancient Greece wasn&#039;t a place with borders but a culture that had a common language and an attitude that those who didn&#039;t understand that language were in some way defective.&nbsp; When &#039;Greeks&#039; travelled to Italy, Spain, Africa or India they expanded the &#039;Greek&#039; world.&nbsp; Whether the people there thought of themselves as &#039;Greek&#039; is a different matter.</p><p>&nbsp;</p><p>Coinage expanded the Greek influence even farther than culture.&nbsp; Places that were very un-Greek issued coins with Greek legends or styles.&nbsp; Trade routes in Africa (Aksum) and Central Asia made Greek coins a fixture in places that never heard of Athens.&nbsp; </p><p>&nbsp;</p><p>Coin collectors force things into neat little categories.&nbsp; In my way of looking at things, coins started in three places.&nbsp; The Chinese cast metal in shapes including the round ones with square holes that became the standard.&nbsp; Indians cut flat metal and hit them with punches (often 5) with various meanings.&nbsp; That system lasted a few hundred years making it least successful of the three.&nbsp; Greeks took more or less round lumps of metal and hammered them between dies cut with a design.&nbsp; In the end, the Greek answer to coins took over more and more of the world to the point that it is hard to find a modern coin that is not a little &#039;Greek&#039;.&nbsp; Where we draw the lines is wholly a matter of opinion.&nbsp; I&#039;ll accept the span suggested.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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