III. Coined Money. — 1. The Antiquity of Coinage.— There are two generally received opinions as to who were the inventors of the coining of money. One is that Phidon, king of Argos, coined both gold and silver money at vEgina at the same time that he introduced a system of weights and measures (Ephor. ap. Strabo, viii, 376; Pollux, ix, 83; ^lian, Var. Hist, xii, 10; Marm. Par.). The date of Phidon, according to the Parian marble, is B.C. 895, but Grote places him be- tween 770 and 730, while Clinton, Bcickh, and Mliller place him between 783 and 744 (Grote, Hist, of Greece, iv, 419, note). The other statement is that the Lyd- ians " were the first nation to introduce the use of gold and silver coin" (Herod, i, 94). This latter assertion was also made, according to Pollux (ix, 6, 83), by Xe- nophanes of Colophon, and is repeated by Eustathius (ap. Dionys. Perieg. v, 840). The early coins of ^Egina and Lydia have a device on one side only, the reverse being an incuse square {quadratum incusum). On the obverse of the yEginetan coins is a tortoise, and on those of the Lydian the head of a lion. The reverse, how- ever, of the uEginetan coins soon shows the incuse square divided into four parts by raised lines, the fourth quar- ter being again divided by a diagonal bar, thus forming
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four compartments. Apart, however, from the historj- relative to these respective coinages, which decidedly is in favor of a Lydian origin (Kawlinson, Ilerod. i, 083 ; Grotefend, Xnm. Citron, i, 235) against the opinion of the late colonel Loake {Num. JIM. App.), the Lydian coins seem to be ruder than those of ^gina, and it is probable that while the idea i){ impress may be assigned to Lydia, the perfecting of the silver and adding a reverse t>jpe, thereby completing the art of coinage, may be given to iEgina (\V. H. Dickinson, Num. Chron. ii, 128). It may be remarked that Herodotus does not speak of the coins of Lydia when a kingdom, which coins have for their typo the heads of a lion and bull facing, and which in all probability belong to Croesus, but of the electrum staters of Asia JMinor. If we conclude that coinage commenced in European and Asiatic Greece about the same time, the next question is whether we can approximately de- termine the date. This is extremely difficult, since there are no coins of a known period before the time of the expedition of Xerxes. The pieces of that age are of so archaic a style that it is hard, at first sight, to believe that there was any length of time between them and the rudest, and therefore earliest, of the coins of .Egina or the Asiatic coast. It must, however, be recollected that in some conditions the growth or change of art is ex- tremely slow, and that this was the case in the early period of Greek art seems evident from the results of the excavations on what we may believe to be the old- est sites in Greece. The lower limit obtained from the evidence of the coins of known date may perhaps be conjectured to be two, or at most three, centuries before their time; the higher limit is as vaguely determined by the negative evidence of the Homeric writings, of which we cannot guess the age, excepting as being before the first Olympiad. On the whole, it seems reasonable to earn,' up (Jreek coinage to the 8th century B.C. Purely Asiatic coinage cannot be taken up to so early a date. The more archaic Persian coins seem to be of the time of Darius Ilystaspis, or possibly of Cyrus, and certainly not much older, and there is n<> A>iuic- iiKincy, unless of Greek cities, that can be reasonably .i— imied to an ear- lier period. Croesus and Cyrus innlialily originated this branch of the coinage, or else Darius Ilystaspis followed the example of the Lydian king. Coined money may therefore liave been known in I'alestine as early as the fall of Samaria, but only through com- merce with the Greeks, and we cannot suppose that it was then current there. The earliest coined money current in Palestine is supposed to be the Daric (see below).
2. The principal Monetary Systems of A ntiq- wiVy.— This subject has already been ably treated by Jlr. K. S. Poole {Knciidopiedia Britannica, s. v. Numismatics), and in the present article it will be sufficient for our purpose to menlion Iniotly tlie different talents (((.v.).
i. The Attic talent was that employed in most Greek cities before the time of Alexander, who adopted it, and from that time it became almost univer- sal in (Jrcek coinage. Its drachm weighed about G7.o grains Troy, and iis tctradrachm 270 grains. In prac- tice it rarely reached (liis standard in coins after the Punic War ; at Alexander's time its tctradrachm weighed about 2(')4 grains.
ii. The JCi/inetan talent, which was used at as early a perioil as the Attic, was employed in Greece and in the islands. Its drachm had an average maximum weight of about 'M'l grains, and its didracbm about 102 grains. When abolished under Aicxandor, lliis weight had fallen to about 180 grains for the didraclini.
iii. The Alerandrian or Ptolemaic talent, which mav also be called the Earlier Phnnician. and also Macedo- nian, as it was used in the earlier coinage of the cities of Macedon, and by tiic ^lacedonian kings before Alex- ander the (ireat, was restored during the sway of the Ptolemies into the talent of Egypt. In the former case its drachm weighed about 112 grains, and its so-called