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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;GinoLR, post: 8535207, member: 128351&quot;]Some inventions or innovations had to wait some time before reaching actual success. In 1900, many of the few automobiles already circulating in Paris were electric cars, but it did not last: 10 years later, almost all cars in the streets had thermic engines, and the electric car technology would not make a significant coming back in the industry until a century later.</p><p>[ATTACH=full]1508010[/ATTACH]</p><p>&nbsp;</p><p>Was it the same for coins? We had all been told that coinage was a Lydian-Ionian invention, that the first coins ever were minted in Lydia and Ephesus in the 7th c. BCE. But in 2018 two small c. 41.5 g silver ingots were published. They were stamped with a jug-shaped die bearing the hieroglyphic inscription: &quot;<i>Tutankhamon king of Heliopolis in Upper Egypt</i>&quot;. See Michel Valloggia, &#039;Note sur deux lingots d’argent de Toutânkhamon&#039;, <i>Revue d&#039;Égyptologie</i> 68 (2017-2018) p. 141-152. These ingots, property of a deceased Swiss collector, were allegedly from a hoard found in Lebanon.</p><p><br /></p><p>[ATTACH=full]1508023[/ATTACH]&nbsp;&nbsp; </p><p>[ATTACH=full]1508024[/ATTACH] </p><p><br /></p><p>Michel Valloggia does not call them &quot;coins&quot;, but it is obvious that in the 14th c. BCE the Egyptians cast small sized precious metal ingots and stamped them with dies bearing an inscription telling under which royal guarantee they have been issued (king Tutankhamon, c. 1345 - c. 1327 BCE). Isn&#039;t this precisely what the Lydians or the Ionians did seven centuries later in electrum, with dies representing a lion head or a grazing deer with the Greek inscription &quot;<i>Phanos emi sema</i>&quot;, and we call it coin minting? The Tutankhamon ingots are called &quot;monetary objects&quot;: if they are monetary, it means that they are a kind of money... </p><p><br /></p><p>Vallogia&#039;s paper was published in 2018 but, curiously, does not seem to have been much cited in literature since. One of the two ingots was auctioned in 2019 (Numismatica Genevensis SA, auction 12.101) with a starting price of CHF 30,000 and sold for 32,000, way too much if suspected to be a forgery but, if considered authentic, a rather moderate sum for such a rare, exceptional and historically important object. I do not understand why this discovery aroused so little enthusiasm.</p><p><br /></p><p>In the late 7th c. BCE the Lydian and Ionian stamped electrum ingots were a successful innovation because other ones of the same kind were minted soon after in more and more other places, and monetary economy eventually spread all over the Mediterranean. It had obviously not been the case in the 14th c. BCE for the Tutankhamon stamped silver ingots : an invention too much ahead of its time?[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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