The creation and distribution of coinage is vastly more than simply the imprinting of a device on a lump of metal or the casting of the same lump of metal with a device. Coinage implies, and indeed requires, several important social, economic, and political conditions, and the initial creation of coinage historically appears to have required additional conditions that became obsolete later.

Herodotus 1.94 says that the Lydians were the first who "νόμισμα χρυσοῦ καὶ ἀργύρου κοψάμενοι ἐχρήσαντο, πρῶτοι δὲ καὶ κάπηλοι ἐγένοντο," "struck and created gold and silver coinage and the first who were shopkeepers." The meaning of the entire sentence is somewhat unclear. Κάπηλοι might mean a peddler or something closer to a financier: no matter the meaning, Herodotus here is surely mistaken, for such non-import trade existed well before the Lydians. Wells' commentary notes that the Lydians were proverbially shopkeepers, so this no doubt is where Herodotus is coming from. Whether Herodotus means by "gold and silver" that the Lydians were the first to mint coinage specifically of gold and silver, rather than other metals, or whether he simply means of precious metals generally is not wholly apparent. Given that the first Lydian coinage is electrum, which by Herodotus' time was no longer a common metal for coinage, rather than either pure gold or silver inclines me to believe he means the latter. In any case, while there's a great deal of debate over the precise date of the earliest Lydian staters, most authorities would place them towards the end of the Greek Archaic Period, which would make them more or less the earliest stamped coinage.

The adjective stamped, and the distinction it provides, is extremely important. Coinage is not the use of particular weights of metal, nor is it the use of metal fashioned into a certain shape. Neither the Greeks (and other ancient peoples) nor modern numismatists generally understood such use of precious metals as coinage. Standardized weights of precious metals have existed and been used in trade for as long as metalworking has existed. Precious metals have been formed into convenient or noticeable shapes to distinguish them as standardized items of trade for about as long. In the Near East and at Egypt the use of bars, spits, or rings of metal as objects of exchange goes back to the Bronze Age if not earlier, and many Greek cities of the Archaic Period used spits of the weight of an obol, the weight of which varied from place to place. The Lacedaemonians were famous for still using--or claiming to use--such unwieldy methods of exchange well into the Classical Period. And unwieldy they were. Spits and bars are all well and good until you have to carry a lot of them, and larger weights such as the lumps of silver, gold, bronze, and iron of a mina or a talent that the Homeric heroes hand out to each other are simply out of the question. Moreover, there is no way to know without testing a hunk of metal whether A) it is in fact as heavy as the person bartering with it says or not and B) whether it is pure or an alloy. Weights of precious metals, whether formed into particular shapes or not, could be created and used by everyone. Even if the scale says it's the right weight there is no guarantee that the iron bar presented to you for several head of cattle is in fact pure iron or whether the buyer has mixed in other metals to give a less precious alloy the appearance of an iron bar.

Coinage therefore requires a single (or several) points of origin--mints--from which it is issued in order to be trusted at all. This further requires a robust and relatively organized (though not necessarily greatly centralized) state apparatus, which also helps in making sure that counterfeiting (not actually that easy to do with stamped or cast coinage, you don't see a lot of modern counterfeiters running of billions in nickels) doesn't happen, increasing trust in the issue. The earliest Lydian and Greek coinage shows clearly where the concern is with minting coins. These early staters are of no particularly discernible form, usually roughly lozenge-shaped lumps obviously formed from just taking a lump of hot metal and letting it cools. They are, however, stamped with a device, and that alone makes them coinage. The concern for minter and user, therefore, was the affirmation that the metal was of the correct purity (more on that to come) and the correct weight. In the case of Lydian coins the royal mint was responsible for that assurance; at the Greek cities like Aegina and Phocaea which rapidly minted their own coinage the city mint gave the same assurance. While counterfeiting was still possible and the weight of a coin could be manipulated by shaving it, such fudgery is a very different problem from private traders fashioning lumps of metal into the proper shapes and passing them off for whatever weight and purity they wish.

It is significant that the first coinage in Lydia and Greece is not gold or silver, but electrum, and the first (cast, not stamped) Roman coinage is in bronze. Both metals are alloys, and while their value depends heavily on the relative ratios of the metals in them it is not easy to determine this by appearance alone: tests by displacement were impossible at this point in antiquity (making the need to determine for sure that the metal came from a state mine, whose quality was known, of even greater importance). Electrum in particular, which unlike bronze occurs naturally, is problematic for traders and states alike. The natural alloy occurs with varying amounts of gold and silver present, and at the end of the Greek Archaic Period it was impossible to determine the purity of a weight of electrum. Osborne, making use of the studies of others, points out that the earliest coinage appeared at multiple places very quickly, all in electrum and all in fractions of staters, sometimes without the full-weight stater ever being minted at all. These many different standards and the use of fractional weights over full-weight coins, combined with the fact that electrum cannot be easily used in international trade due to the inability to assess its purity, has led scholars to think that the earliest coinage was primarily internal. Although conversions from one currency to another are fairly easy, though clumsy and time-consuming, the most usual method for long-distance trade from at least the Bronze Age in the Mediterranean world was simply to trade in weights of bullion, the same system as I've mentioned above. A weight of silver (provided it was pure!) was the same as any other weight of silver, and this is generally how later gold and silver coinage was used outside city boundaries within the historical period. Electrum, however, does not work like this, but all this makes excellent sense combined with everything said already. Electrum, only suitable for trade within the city itself, still had to be assessed for its weight. Therefore, the issuing mint affirmed the weight. Yet electrum was still of uncertain purity. The mint's mark assured the user that the electrum lump was from the state's mines (or whatever source was used) and therefore, no matter what its real purity, could be used internally as if all such coins were of the same purity.

1/2