Episode 46. How Greece Turned Silver Into Power

Ships got faster, roads stretched farther, and fear did the rest. We follow Greece from the ashes of the Late Bronze Age collapse to a world where stamped silver didn’t just buy grain and oarsmen—it built fleets, financed wars, and rewired how people thought about law, status, and freedom. Lydia may have minted first, but Ionia made coinage a habit, turning measured metal into everyday money that paid juries, rowers, craftsmen, and mercenaries. As the Agora shifted from public debate to humming marketplace, Athens funded its ambitions through Laurion silver, tribute from subject cities, fines, and liturgies assigned to the wealthy—sidestepping direct taxes while scaling a maritime empire.

Mercenaries accelerated the revolution. States needed reliable payrolls, and coins beat IOUs on campaign. Carthage, long tied to ingots, minted in Sicily to pay Greek soldiers, proving how war can force monetary innovation. Seigniorage powered city-states: mints captured the spread between face value and metal cost, turning coinage into civic revenue. Designs mattered. Owls, gods, and later Alexander’s portrait broadcast identity and legitimacy, turning currency into portable propaganda. Silver dominated daily life because it divided cleanly and traveled well; gold stayed in hoards, dowries, and high diplomacy. Where coin circulation rose, money velocity jumped, markets thickened, and specialized labor took root.

Beneath the metal ran ideas. The Axial Age brought written laws, standardized measures, and a new respect for reasoned order—perfect companions to standardized money. Numisma, rooted in law, framed coins as instruments of justice as much as exchange. Monetization loosened rigid hierarchies: birth ceded ground to balance sheets, and social mobility edged in without revolution. From owls to armies, from hoards to harbors, this story shows how money’s most durable alloy is trust, law, and the hard calculus of power.

If this journey through ancient finance, warfare, and markets sparked new questions, follow and share the show, and leave a review with the one idea you’ll be debating at your next dinner.

Chapters

• 0:01 After The Bronze Age Collapse
• 3:30 Trade, Violence, And Power
• 6:40 From Oxen To Silver Money
• 10:40 The Axial Age And Coin Invention
• 14:20 Mercenaries And The Spread Of Coins
• 18:00 Mints, Seigniorage, And Civic Identity
• 22:00 Markets, Agoras, And Athenian Finance
• 25:30 Ionia, Lydia, And Early Monetary Society
• 29:00 Social Mobility And Money’s Disruption
• 32:00 Propaganda On Coins From Athena To Alexander
• 36:00 Hoards, The Silk Road, And Safe Keeping
• 39:40 Silver’s Dominance And Sicily’s Wars
• 43:00 Laurion Mines And Mass Minting
• 46:00 Coin Art, Messaging, And Temple Accounting

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:00

The Greeks, like nearly all the cultures near the Eastern Mediterranean, were severely weakened by the sea people, in what is commonly referred to as the Late Bronze Age collapse, which would have occurred around 1100 to 1200 BCE. The damage was so severe that certain cultures were essentially wiped off the map, and even the mighty Assyrians were forced to give up most of their territories as it retreated to the regions of Nineveh and Asher. Certain places in the Greek world were impaired to the point that it's possible that the local population may have declined by up to 90%. However, over the next five to six hundred years, the Greek culture began a slow recovery and rise. While the Greeks were millennia behind the Mesopotamians in terms of writing, mathematics, and organized trade, the regrowth of the various Greek populations meant that they would need to innovate ways to support its people while simultaneously having poor soil. However, as technologies allowed for better shipbuilding and the construction of wide-ranging road systems, it also meant that certain cultures, whether it was the Greeks or foreign competitors, would become much more competitive and efficient in trade. Furthermore, since the beginning of time, people who had resources or the need of resources were willing to deploy violence to try and garner a disproportionate amount of the spoils. And some of the reasons why the Greeks had seen a steep rise in power was through innovation and education. Another reason was their willingness to deploy violence against fellow Greeks and non-Greeks alike. The fact is during the post-Bronze Age collapse rise and then through the classical Greek period, the people of Athens and other Greek city-states realized that once people of other nations didn't share their values and felt that they could inflict the most violence against them, and then they knew that they would just plunder and take their resources, including silver and gold, along with precious stones, and its citizens for slavery, nearly every culture realized then, as they still know now, that the peoples who didn't share the same values would do this in a heartbeat if they knew they can execute the mission. It's this fear that often drives innovation and people to war. Especially the elites, because they are more willing to send the working poor off to die so they can take the conquered resources for themselves. In the ancient world, oftentimes they would just pay foreigners to be the mercenary soldier force. This is the reason why a lot of war happens, whether it's ancient war or modern war. The elites want other people's land and resources, so they are willing to send off the working poor to die to acquire it. However, at least in the ancient Greek and Roman world, it was the landowners who served because they needed to defend their land. The Mesopotamians, which included the Sumerians, Akkadians, Assyrians, and Babylonians, were originally some of the fiercest armies that were achieving these means of conquest and plunder. However, the Persians were next in a line to be the dominant hegemon. Even though all these cultures didn't share the same value system, they all shared and continue to share to this day the value of dominance. It's no different when Sargon the Great was building the world's first empire around 2400 BCE, and it's no different than the current US Empire. However, each culture builds its empire differently. The Greeks were going to use their navies because they knew from centuries of fighting each other that defensive measures were always needed because they knew and still know that they lived in a world where someone will come for them and willingly and unflinchingly kill them and take anything that they could transport as their own. So the Greeks, because they were always fighting each other, had known for a long time up to this point of around 600 BCE, that they would always need a certain level of offense, but more importantly, defensive measures. The fact is, whether it's the Greeks, Akkadians, the British, or even the Americans, it's just part of what it means to be a prosperous culture. The Assyrians are often viewed as one of the most bloodthirsty cultures ever. However, they didn't just decide one day to be great military power. Instead, they were initially a city-state consisting of numerous successful long-distance traders in Mesopotamia and Anatolia. They built out their military in large part as a measure of protecting their wealth and trade because they knew, like everyone else, that if they didn't do this, then someone else would come in and take it. While the Phoenicians and then their Carthage cousins were the first two sea power states, the Greeks, in part due to their poor soil, realized that the sea could be a source of opportunity. Furthermore, even though the Greeks didn't invent coinage, they may have been the first culture to build their empire in large part through the expansion of coinage and the development of their proto-banking sector. So while bullion was flowing into Greek lands through trade and mining, much of the profits were ploughed back into their navies and land armies. The wealth and defense of the territories gave rise to the polis, as it emerged as a unique form of organization in the ancient Greek world. This was a different government structure from the centralized monarchies of the Near East. Rather than being ruled by a single king or priestly class, many Greek city-states developed a more participation-based form of governance. However, the degree of democracy varied between each polis or city-state. Additionally, each city-state acted as a mini country. As Greek communities grew wealthier through trade, agriculture, and colonization, they invented a share of infrastructure like temples, the agoraas, or public squares, and water work systems. These projects fostered civic identity and cooperation among its citizens. In Mesopotamia, the Babylonians, Assyrians, and the Sumerians were utilizing silver as their preferred unit of value and medium of exchange for nearly a thousand years. In Greece, it was initially oxen as a common unit of value for expressing the worth of goods and services prior to the classical Greece period. For example, a bronze cauldron might be worth one ox, while a fine tripod could be worth 12 oxen. Oxen were never exchanged though, it was just a benchmark of value of certain goods or services that would have been traded. However, as the Greek city-states expanded, the idea of using cattle as a pure unit of account was no longer practical, especially with the expansion of long distance trade. Therefore, the Greeks started using other items as a unit of account, such as everyday items like a cooking iron spitz and of course silver ingots. In order for an object to become an accepted medium of exchange and therefore function as money, it needs to have the ability to be divided easily into smaller units. It also needs to be portable and therefore not expensive to move. Accepted money also needs to have a store of value, which means the asset has to retain its value over time, allowing it to be saved, retrieved, and exchanged in the future without significant depreciation. It essentially ensures that wealth held today would not lose significant purchasing power over time, assuming that there are not steep inflationary pressures. Cattle obviously can't be a form of money because you can't divide a cow up into smaller pieces. Cattle is expensive to move because you need to feed them and keep them well hydrated and safe from predators and thieves. And they are prone to disease. Another issue is cows and oxen only have a working lifespan of about 10 years, so they don't retain value over long periods of time. In addition, a talent was used as a standard unit of weight and value, primarily used to signify a substantial measure of wealth or value of goods. An addic talent, a prominent standard, was equivalent to approximately 26 kilograms or 57 pounds of pure silver. Homer's Iliad used oxen as a measure of value, with one exchange of armor described as equivalent to 100 oxen. Across the ancient world, including Sumer a few thousand years prior, the origin of interest derived from the offspring of livestock. The Sumerian word for interest, mas signifies a calf or baby cow. The ancient Egyptian equivalent mis represents to give birth. In ancient Greek, interest is tokos or calf. From a practical point of view, cattle creating interest is a natural occurrence as they have offspring. If a farmer has a hundred head of cattle and six calves are born that year and none died, the farmer had a natural growth rate of 6%. So while the Greeks were catching and even surpassing the people of Mesopotamia in terms of the use of coinage and trade, a German philosopher named Carl Jaspers coined the term the Axial Age, which would have started sometime from around 800 through 200 BCE. This age wasn't isolated to just Greece. This was also occurring in India and China as well, and then through Mesopotamia and Iran. What this was was a new intellectual philosophy that was taking hold independently of each other. In other words, this philosophical thought process was similar in Greece, China, and India without each other knowing about it. What Jaspers argued was this was the first period in history where humans transitioned from more mythological and tribal worldviews to a greater emphasis on individual reflection, universal truths, and abstract thought. In other words, people began to apply principles of reason inquiry to the great questions of human existence. He also observed that China, India, and the Mediterranean witnessed identical philosophical tendencies independent of each other. These philosophies included ideas related to the cosmos, body and mind, action, and the ends of human existence. It was during the beginnings of the Great Minds, such as Pythagoras, Confucius, and the Buddha, which coincide with the development of coinage in Lydia and then in Greece. In addition, China and India also developed coins within close proximity to each other in terms of dates. One could make the argument that, with the exception of Greece, any one of those locations would have originally developed coinage, but it appears that Lydia may have been, in fact, first. A coin was nothing more than a standardized weight of a lump of metal with a stamp on it. The metal could have included silver or gold, but at first it was typically electrum, which was a combination of gold and silver, and in the case of China, they often used bronze or copper. And in some cases, China didn't develop brown coins, but instead designed their own coins in the shape of cowory shells. Additionally, in some cases, Chinese coins took the form of knives or spades during the Zhou Empire, during the spring and autumn periods of China, which was from around 771 BCE through 256 BCE. As crazy as it sounds, the knife and spade shape currency made a minor comeback under Wang Mang, who temporarily usurped the Han Dynasty and established the Xin dynasty from 9 BCE to 23 AD before the Han established control. In many regions of the world, during this so-called Axial Age, large amounts of gold and silver were removed from temples, palaces, and the ultra wealthy, and from there it made its way to ordinary people, of which they typically broke it down into smaller pieces to be used for everyday transactions. The reason why this happened was this was the first time of intense warfare throughout the known world, whether it was in China, India, or even the breakup of the Assyrian Empire. Widespread warfare means widespread trading posts and plunder, and therefore large movements of silver, gold, and other precious metals were taken and passed on in trade. In other words, this period of intense warfare may have had a stimulative effect as it primed the pump for increased economic activities throughout these regions that became unstable. Furthermore, as warfare increases, the use of debt also decreases. Consequently, people would tend to transact in metals if they feel credit risks are too high because no one wants to lend or accept IOUs to people on the losing end. The period when the Greeks began to use coinage was also the same time that they developed their famous phalanx position. This tactic was so successful that any state that had excess amounts of gold or silver would have sought out Greek mercenary soldiers who then would have brought their payments in gold and silver back to Greece, thus putting more of these precious metals into circulation. In fact, the reason why certain states started to mint their own coins was because Greek mercenary soldiers would only accept coinage as a form of payment. Subsequently, some people have hypothesized that the reason why the Lydians developed coins in the first place was to pay Greek mercenary soldiers. That's a major reason why over 100 mints were actively developing coinage throughout Greece by 480 BCE. By its peak, over 400 Greek city-states had established their own mints and each furiously guarded the exclusive rights to produce coinage within its borders. This monopoly reflected a deep-seated belief that control of currency was too vital to entrust to private interests. To assert both authority and identity, these states struck coins with distinctive designs, featuring local gods, heroes, or even symbols. The result was an extraordinary assortment of currencies, each serving as both economic instruments and civic propaganda. While experts know very little about the staffing of the typical Greek mint, most of the workers appear to have been slaves. The fact remains that early coinage thrived on the constant warfare of its human hosts. The more the Greeks and later Romans fought, the greater the demand of coins to fund their conflicts. This close link between coinage and war has long been recognized by numismatists, economists, and historians alike. It's no surprise then that Greek coinage reached its peak during the reign of Alexander the Great, when coin production soared to unprecedented levels. To back this statement up, many other advanced states such as Carthage hadn't yet fully embraced coinage soon after Greece had fully committed to its use. In fact, Carthage, one of the world's great sea powers, and possibly the richest state in the known world at the time, has solely relied on metal ingots to conduct trade, and thus were kind of late to the party when they finally adopted coinage. The reason they adopted coinage in the first place was they needed to pay Greek mercenary soldiers on Sicily to defend their lands from other Greeks from Syracuse and other small cities on the eastern shores of the island. In addition to the coins received as pay for their services, the soldiers typically took portable items such as items made of gold and silver and other precious stones when they plundered a city. Consequently, soldiers were flushed with coins and other valuable commodities after certain battles. The gold and silver taken was often melted down to create additional coinage. Eventually, the soldiers with relatively vast sums of coins would need to spend it. And it wasn't uncommon for the consumption to take place not far from the battlefield or where temporary barracks were erected. Once the coins changed hands, it often was sent rapidly through their local economies. In modern terms, this would have meant a higher velocity of money, which means more frequent transactions and spending, suggesting a vibrant economy, potentially leading to economic growth. In contrast, lower velocity suggests people are saving more, which can be a signal of economic slowdown that could trigger a recession or a contraction. This velocity of money in a given area would have attracted merchants and therefore local markets started to spring up. Mercenaries that were paid in coins, which often would have been silver or electrum, which was an alley of gold and silver, brought back their savings and plunder to their home city states. This influx of precious metals significantly increased the amount of gold and silver in circulation within the Greek city states, fueling a shift from a largely credit and in-kind payment system to a monetized economy. Consequently, the increased circulation of coinage facilitated easier transactions, which then resulted in the growth of local markets within Greece as well as trade with other city-states and regions. This expansion of the trade networks, both within and outside of Greece, further boosted circulation and acceptance of coins. The widespread circulation, along with the acceptance and usage of coinage, led to a change in governmental practices. Local governments started demanding that taxes and fines be paid in coins rather than in goods like wheat or other commodities. This further solidified the role of coinage as the primary medium of exchange. The more the Greeks interacted with foreign traders and governments, the more they also shifted to a monetized society. In other words, the foreign peoples and governments saw the use of coinage from the Greeks, and then they also started to transact in coinage as well. With regards to taxes and fees, classical Greeks looked upon direct taxes as tyrannical and detrimental to freedom. Thereby they avoided them whenever possible. Therefore, Athenian citizens essentially did not pay taxes directly. However, the city did sometimes distribute money to its citizens, through generous fees for jury duty or attending the assembly, which could be viewed as a subsidization for merely living in Athens. However, Athens had to get money somehow to fund the governments and infrastructure projects or build a navy and fund their army for defensive purposes. Luckily for Athens, it was in close proximity to the Lorian mines. In addition, Athens extracted tribute payments from its subject cities within the Athenian Empire, which were also used to fund its government expenses. Additionally, the wealthiest citizens were expected to fund public services like equipping warships and maintaining public gymnasia, for example. These were seen as honorable civic duties, not burdensome taxes, and served as a crucial source of public funding. Lastly, the government imposed fines for various infractions, such as official misconduct or disorderly behavior in the assembly. What this all means is the culture of Athens meant that they imposed a system of indirect taxation through tributes and public service contributions from its wealthiest citizens, supplemented by the profits from the silver mines to support public works and provide benefits to its citizens, rather than imposing direct taxes. As the populations grew, each city-state naturally created a public space called the Agoras, where citizens gathered to hear philosophical debates. Socrates, for example, was known for his lectures in the Athenian Agora. Additionally, the Agora would have been the equivalent of the ancient news channel, and in some cases, they would have had formal meetings of its citizens. Also, there were religious rituals done in the public square. It ultimately embodied the Greek ideal of collective self-governance. As the Greek trade networks expanded, especially from the 6th century BC onward, the agora naturally attracted merchants. The amount of people already congregated in the area and the proximity to the docks and roads made it a practical marketplace for imported goods and local products. Over time, dedicated market stalls were built, thereby making it a formal commercial site. In Athens, the agora was even split into two separate areas, the political agora and the commercial agora. As city-states grew in population and wealth, daily survival relied less on subsistence farming and more on specialized labor and trade. The agora became the place where ordinary people, not just the elites, engaged in economic activity. In modern Greek, the word agora is a noun that means market and a verb that means to buy. The much older cultures, such as Babylonians, used temples or palaces to control trade and therefore got its start through a central planning process. However, the Greek markets were originally developed as a decentralized district driven by private transactions. The Agora's hybrid role, part political, part commercial, underlined the Greek balance between civic life and individualism. In the Hellenistic and later Roman periods, direct democracy weakened. Therefore, the Agora's political role was diminished. Meanwhile, trade became the lifeblood of cities. In other words, the agoras declined as a forum for public debate, but prevailed as a marketplace. This is not unlike modern tensions between public discourse and consumerism. For example, in modern times in towns throughout the United States, town squares were once a place of great debate, but now town squares are often hosts of farmers' markets, with fewer to no political gatherings. Therefore, the Agoras evolved from a multipurpose civic space to a lively commercial hub, as it reflected the priority shifts in the Greek society, from political debates to economic activity. In order to fully understand how the Greeks evolved from prioritizing political discourse to trade, it's worth taking a step back to look at how the Greek culture spread. The Greeks arrived in western Anatolia sometime after the late Bronze Age collapse and colonized an area located on the western coast of Anatolia. Due to its location on the coast and the fact that they are already accustomed to the sea, the Ionian Greeks quickly became experienced sea traders. As such, they primarily traded with the Lydians, the Egyptians, and even various city-states in and around the Italian peninsula. This extensive trade resulted in the Ionians becoming one of the wealthiest civilizations in the Near East. They used this wealth to set up formal trading settlements around the Black Sea as well. Once the Lydian capital of Sardis fell, the Ionian city of Miletus replaced Sardis as the hub of trade and scholarship. In addition, it appears that Miletus may have been the first Greek city-state to strike its own coins. Furthermore, it may have been the first city-state to fully embrace coinage for everyday transactions, meaning it mostly replaced transactions carried out primarily in credits that were settled in ingots or other commodities. Sardis was a cosmopolitan city. As such, some of the great minds of Babylonia, Egypt, Lydia, and from the various Phoenician city-states made their way there to share much of their scholarly research. This research included ideas related to the sciences, along with navigation, geography, trade, and commerce. In addition, the elites of Sardis as well as Miletus were some of the biggest collectors of art and other crafts, which meant that artisans from the known world at the time would have made their way to western Anatolia to make and produce their various works of art and other finished goods. In fact, to show you how Greek influenced Lydian religion, the Lydian kings who were referred to as the richest men in the world hired Ionian craftsmen to create offerings to the god Apollo at Delphi. Since the Ionians and Lydians maintained a close working relationship, they were able to use each other as a source of knowledge to scale up trade operations, leading to efficiencies. Furthermore, Lydia introduced coinus to Anatolia and the Near East, of which the Ionian Greeks quickly adopted in their own transactions. In fact, it could be said that the greatness of Greece came from their Lydian neighbors as they introduced them to not only coinage but also modern markets, along with wholesale and retail distribution. It is important to note that all money is not necessarily currency or legal tender for all debts public and private. An ancient Greek drachma is a money and coin, but no longer currency. A ten dollar Federal Reserve note is money and currency, but not a coin. In the American prison system, cigarettes can be a form of money, but is obviously not currency. Therefore, money could be anything widely accepted as a medium of exchange, unit of account, and a store of value. Currency refers to the physical or tangible forms of money issued and regulated by a government or central authority intended for use as legal tender within a specific jurisdiction. Legal tender specifically designates a form of money that the government legally recognizes for the settlement of debts, both public and private. In essence, while all currency is a form of money and most currency also holds legal tender status, not everything that functions as money is necessarily currency or legal tender. In ancient times, even though coins may have been issued in one place, it wasn't uncommon for them to be accepted widely throughout their trade partners, even if it was a different kingdom. Why? Because silver is silver and gold is gold. In the early days of the US colonies, the British wanted to keep as much of their gold and silver in the British Isles, so their currency didn't circulate much in the early colonies. Therefore, the U.S. colonies resorted to using the nearest thing to an international currency at the time. They adopted the use of the Spanish dollar. As the use of cornage spread in and around the various Greek city-states, they would also use it for non-trade purposes. One interesting fact was they started compensating Olympic athletes as a direct result of the widespread use and acceptance of coins, not in-kind payments like wheat or olive oil. Another key aspect that makes the use of coinage more efficient is the fact that the advancements in writing with the adoption of the alphabet by the Greeks by way of the Phoenicians and accounting practices developed by the Sumerians and the Akkadians allowed the Greeks to be able to accurately track and maintain monetary accounts and payments. Also, since the classical Greek economy was developed nearly 3,000 years after Sumer, classical Greek literature gives us the ability to observe their economic transformation in real time. Even though the earliest known coins were minted in Lydia, it was the Ionian Greeks that began to fully accept the idea that coinage represented an ideal means of exchange and thus represented a new concept of economic value. Once the idea of coinage was fully accepted, Accepted by the Ionians, it spread rapidly throughout the Greek world. By around 480 BCE, there were nearly a hundred mints operating in the Greek world. Other adopters of coinage preferred coins to pay mercenary soldiers, but the Greeks expanded payments in coins for public and private wages, rents, and commodity prices. Therefore, it can be argued that the city-states of classical Greece had become the first monetary societies. For millennia up to this point, societies were generally quite static. Social position was usually fixed. If you were born a peasant, you died a peasant. If you were born to a chieftain, you died a chieftain. In the new world the Greeks were creating, everything became relative. A man's worth was measured by money, and the purest form of money had no natural limit if you were a citizen. The aristocrat Aristodemus of Argos was disgusted by this new order when he lost his wealth, and with it his friends. Now that wealth determines social standing, birth, honor, and tradition meant nothing. Lose your wealth, and you become a nobody. The elites were probably threatened by the fact that money offers something unprecedented. The promise of social mobility combined with political stability. Society up until it became monetized was rigid. Unless a commoner rose up and usurped the king, there were societal constraints that generally fix social hierarchy. However, once money was widely available, a risk taker with ambition and entrepreneurship could achieve upward mobility. Money became the universal solvent, dissolving traditional obligations in favor of individual opportunity. The Greeks became monetized when they minted quasi coins of irregular shape around 595 BCE. These first coins in the region were made of electrum, which was a naturally occurring mix of gold and silver, and were stamped with an image of a turtle on one side, representing its history with trade by the sea. The spread of coinage by the Greeks wasn't a political decision as it developed organically after Lydian coins appeared because the Greeks saw coins as efficient. Therefore, coinage quickly became a necessity for trade. The Greeks also adopted the same strategy as the Lydians when minting their coins, as every coin had a face value higher than its production costs. This concept of production versus face value is known as seigniorage, which means governments literally are able to make money by creating money. It is calculated as the difference between the face value of money and the cost of producing it. Historically, it was a fee a government, king, or even lord took for coining metal. But today it's the revenue central banks receive from printing currency or creating money electronically for which they don't have to pay interest. This profit allowed each polis to fund public works projects or even worse. To explain it further, the Greeks noticed that the Lydians were able to make money by minting their own coins. The reason being was the Lydian government generally assessed the face value of the coins at a little bit more than the underlying value of the weight of metals in the coins. Therefore, the local and foreign markets would have traded coins that were in fact overvalued in comparison to the underlying weights. Consequently, the government was able to generate a profitable spread between the underlying ingots and the accepted value of the coins. To placate this controversy, the Lydians came up with a genius strategy as they struck the coins with religious symbols to further induce their usage because you weren't profiting the king, instead, you were paying tribute to the gods. These Lydian coins were created to authenticate payments as coinage took trade and increased its efficiency as traders would no longer need to weigh out the silver or the gold. The Greeks saw this and used a similar tactic. One interesting aspect was they frequently used female portraits on coins, and sometimes their symbols are no different than those of men's. The ancient Greeks used imagery of their cities and striking patron goddesses such as Athena and Aphrodite. However, Alexander the Great put his own face on the coins. Some have thought that this was offensive and arrogant to put your own face in place of the gods, but the fact remains that the use of Alexander's portrait served as a tool for political messaging and propaganda, conveying ideas of legitimacy and imperial unity. The continued use of his imagery by various rulers points to how effective this strategy was. Despite this, Alexander wasn't the first to use his image instead of a god. Darius I of the Persian Empire did this a few hundred years prior, as his coins featured an archer, possibly Darius. Each city-state struck its own coins to profit from seignorage. As a result, coinage in Greece was not uniform and existed in various forms and denominations. Given Greece's abundant silver resources, silver coins were the primary medium of exchange. These coins were well suited for everyday transactions due to their smaller value. For example, when gold started to be passed on as the medium of exchange in Mesopotamia more than a thousand years prior, it was never used in everyday transactions. Instead, it was only used in large or very expensive transactions. Accordingly, small silver coins often held disproportionate value within local markets. One possible explanation for the extensive use lies in the philosophical and political developments of the time. In the 6th century BCE Greece, the emergence of written law codes, standardized weights and measures, and ultimately democracy created productive grounds for the rapid spread of silver coinage. Philosophers viewed coinage as a practical tool for enforcing laws, enabling a transition from a system based on royal taxation and redistribution to one rooted in democratic market economies. Coins facilitated free individual transactions in both local trade and exchange of foreign goods. Notably, one of the Greek words for money, numisma, derived from gnomos, which means law, a linguistic link that also gave rise to the term of numismatic. This origin suggests that the adoption of coinage in Greece may have been driven not only by economic needs, but also by philosophical needs. However, historians continue to debate the relative influence of these two factors in the spread of Greek coinage. Gold coins were minted and put into circulation. However, even when small gold coins held a disproportionately high value in comparison to silver coins and were generally impractical for routine use, instead, gold was typically reserved or hoarded for large-scale or high-value transactions. Therefore, expensive coins were often buried or hid to reserve for tough times or in the use of big transactions if needed. It's because of this that we end up finding hoards of coins because oftentimes what ends up happening is someone will hide coins if they feel that an attack by hostile force is coming. The goal is to hide the money, get to safety, and then come back to it when it's safe. But what happens if you don't make it back because they are killed or taken as a slave? Or possibly they hide their valuable coins for general safety, but they end up dying of natural causes. The whereabouts of these treasures is lost forever until someone happens to come across the horde by accident. Hordes were commonly found in the stands. Stan is a suffix derived from Persian and Urdu, meaning land of or place of. It is a common ending for countries in Central and South Asia. These countries with large hordes were discovered, included places like Afghanistan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, and Turkmenistan, in a region once known as Bactria. While this region may appear to be somewhat unknown to many in the West, it was deeply coveted by Cyrus the Great, Alexander the Great, and then Jengis Khan. And that doesn't include the countless other leaders that may have been lost to history. The reason why this region became so important was it was a vital link that connected China and West Asia and then into Europe, as this region was part of the Long Silk Road. So therefore, when powerful leaders show up to your town, you have every incentive to hide your coins as they will be an easy target, since every person had to act as their own bank vault. Whether to safeguard long-term savings or to stash a talent of silver in the face of a sudden threat, such as invasions or even political instability or coups, money and other treasures were often secreted inside of homes or buried outside in fields or forests. Sometimes people would bury coins under buildings to consecrate it. Furthermore, the ancients used to place a coin on the eyes or in the mouths of the deceased in order to pay the ferryman, Karan, for passage into the underworld across the river Styx. Since much of this trade was flowing through the Stan region, it became a very wealthy part of the world, and therefore it wasn't all that uncommon for outsiders to want a peace, or most likely all of it. Meanwhile, silver coins were generally not hoarded in the same way that gold coins were, and therefore they circulated widely for local trade and official payments, such as wages for soldiers and salaries for civil servants. As Greece engaged in trade with its colonies across the Mediterranean, silver coins, rather than gold, became the dominant currency in circulation throughout the ancient world. Even before the advent of coinage, silver ingots were already widely used as a form of proto money to facilitate overseas transactions. Additionally, while silver mines were relatively abundant in the Near East and the Mediterranean regions, gold deposits were scarce, and naturally occurring electrum was even rarer. For more than a thousand years before the advent of coinage, the people of Mesopotamia and the Phoenicians preferred the use of silver ingots as the predominant commodity or proto money to settle payments for overseas trading. While the Phoenicians and later the Carthaginians were the original sea powers, they relied heavily on using silver ingots and not coins for nearly 200 years after the Lydians and the Greeks adopted the use of coins and trade. So, in other words, Phoenicia and Carthage were slow to adopt the new ways of the world. However, Greek colonies in Sicily and Carthage were in constant states of warfare to control the island. Nevertheless, these conflicts between the Greeks and the Carthaginians resulted in cultural and ideas exchange, even if they were warring with each other. By around 540 BCE, coins were commonplaces in places like Syracuse, and therefore the Greeks on Sicily began minting coins themselves. It's because the Carthaginians had to pay Greek mercenary soldiers that they finally got around to minting coins around 425 BCE. The first Carthage mints were established on Western Sicily in modern day Palermo. Like the coinage produced in the Greek communities in Sicily, it was minted solely in silver on the Attic weight standard. Consequently, the Carthaginian economy was monetized in the 5th century primarily to pay Greek soldiers to fight other Greek armies on Sicily. The iconic Tetrajon, featuring the goddess Athena, and her owl first appeared sometime after 525 BCE. To mass produce these coins, the Athenians developed the first intensive mining in the history of silver extraction at the Lorian mines. These mines were located on the southern tip of Attica, about 30 miles or almost 50 kilometers south of Athens. For this, a massive slave force was employed that allowed them to extract massive amounts of silver. In fact, in the year 483 BCE, they extracted for the minting of coins about 2.5 tons of silver. But that was just one year. It had been estimated that the mines produced an estimated 3,500 tons or 100 million ounces of silver from the 7th to 1st century BCE. The ancients quickly realized the official mark stamped on one side of the coin could be complemented with a design on the other side, effectively doubling the coin's commutative power. Therefore, messages could be conveyed on both sides of the currency. Most Greek coins were crafted to be far more beautiful than what was necessary for simple commercial use. In modern times, they were creatively packaged to attract buyers and promote the issuing city. In other words, they were marketing tools for the issuing city states. To accomplish this, they brought artisans in to create works of art on the coins. What began as measured lumps of metal that were most likely more like nuggets transformed into miniature masterpieces. Cities competed for recognition and prestige through their coinage. Numerous cities, for instance, claimed to be Homer's birthplace by depicting the poet on their coins. The Macedonian town of Unumia used as coins to illustrate the escape of Aeneas and his family from Troy. Ancient coins, however, rarely displayed numerical dates. By the 6th century BCE, inscriptions at the Temple of Hera on the island of Samos, which was the most prestigious Greek religious sanctuary at its time, began defining the monetary value of dedicating offerings to the goddess. This practice marked a shift as even in religious environments, wealth was now quantified in standardized terms, reflecting the growing role of currency in the Greek society. The Temple of Hera on Samos was a major panhellenic site. In other words, it wasn't a patron god or goddess of a particular city, therefore, it likely influenced other shrines to adopt similar record keeping, merging piety with financial transparency. This suggests that coin money was gaining transaction beyond trade as it permeated both spiritual and civic institutions. The Samos inscriptions are among the earliest evidence of money being used not just as a medium of exchange, but as a measure of value, even for the sacred.com slash history of money banking trade, or you can visit our website at moneybankingtrade.com. Thank you very much. Talk to you soon.