25
Gold Coin of Croesus
Gold coin, minted in Turkey
AROUND 550 BC
'As rich as Croesus'. It's a phrase that echoes down the centuries and
is still used in advertisements for get-rich-quick investment wheezes.
But how many of those who use it ever pause to think about the
original King Croesus, who, until a twist at the end of his life, was
indeed fabulously rich and, as far as we know, very happy with it?
Croesus was a king in what's now western Turkey. His kingdom,
Lydia, was among the new powers that emerged across the Middle
East about 3,000 years ago, and these are some of the original gold
coins that made Lydia and Croesus so rich. They are examples of a
new type of object that would ultimately become a power in its own
right - coinage .
We've all grown so accustomed to using little round pieces of
metal to buy things that it's easy to forget that coins arrived quite
late in the history of the world. For more than 2,000 years states ran
complex economies and international trading networks without a
coin to hand. The Egyptians, for example, used a sophisticated
system that measured value against standard weights of copper and
gold. But as new states and new ways of organizing trade emerged,
coinage began to make an appearance. Fascinatingly, it happened
independently in two different parts of the world at almost the same
time. The Chinese began using miniature spades and knives in very
much the same way that we wou ld now use coins, and virtually
simultaneously
in the Mediterranean world the Lydians started
making actual coins as we would still recognize them - round shapes
in precious metals.
These early Lydian coins come in many different sizes , from about
the scale of a modem British 1p piece right down to something
hardly bigger than a lentil. Lydian coins are not all the same shape.
The largest one here is a kind of figure-of-eight shape - an oblong,
slightly squeezed in the middle - and on it are a lion and a bull facing
each other as if in combat, and about to crash together head-on .
These coins were minted under Croesus around 550 BC. It's said
that Croesus found his gold in the river that once belonged to the
legendary Midas - he of 'the golden t ouch' - and it's certain that the
region was rich in gold, which would have been extremely useful in
the great trading metropolis of Lydia's capital city, Sardis, in northwest Turkey.
In small societies there isn't really a great need for money. You can
generally trust your friends and neighbours to return any labour,
food or goods in kind. The need for money, as we understand it,
grows when you are dealing with strangers you may never see again
and can't necessarily trust - that is, when you're trading in a
cosmopolitan city like Sardis.
Before the first Lydian coins, payments were made mostly in
precious metal - effectively just lumps of gold and silver. It didn't
really matter what shape the metal was, just how much it weighed
and how pure it was. But there is a difficulty. In their natural state,
gold and silver are often found mixed with each other and, indeed,
mixed with other less valuable metals. Checking a metal's purity
was a tedious task, likely to hold up every business transaction. Even
once the Lydians and their neighbours had invented coinage, about a
hundred years before Croesus, this problem of purity still remained.
They used the naturally occurring mixture of gold and silver, not the
pure forms of the metals. How could you know exactly what a
particular coin was made of and therefore what it was worth?
The Lydians eventually solved this problem, speeded up the market
and, in the process, became hugely rich. They realized that the
answer was for the state to mint coins of pure gold and pure silver,
of consistent weights that would have absolutely reliable value. If
the state guaranteed it, this would be a currency that you could trust
completely and, without any checking, spend or accept without a
qualm. How did the Lydians manage to pull this off? Dr Paul
Craddock, an expert in historical metals, explains:
The Lydians hit on the idea of the state, or the king , issuing standard
weights and standard purity. The stamps on them are the guarantee of the
weight and the purity. If you 're guaranteeing the purity, then it is
absolutely necessary that you have the ability not just to add elements to
the gold but also to take them out. To some degree, taking out elements
like lead and copper is not too bad ; but unfortunately the main element
that came with the gold out of the ground was silver, and this had not been
done before. Silver is reasonably resistant to chemical attack, and gold is
very resistant to chemical attack. They took either a very fine powder of
the gold straight from the mines, or else got bigger pieces of old gold
hammered out into very thin sheets and put these in a pot along with
common salt, sodium chloride. They then heated that in a furnace to about
800 degrees centigrade, and ultimate ly they were left with pretty pure
gold.
So the Lydians learnt how to make pure gold coins. No less
importantly, they then employed craftsmen to stamp on them
symbols indicating their weight, and thus their value. These first
coins have no writing on them - dates and inscriptions on coins were
to come much later - but archaeological evidence allows us to date
our coins to around 550 BC, the middle of Croesus's reign .
The stamp used to indicate weight on his coins was a lion, and as
the size and therefore the value of the coin decreased, ever smaller
parts of the lion's anatomy were used. So, for example, the smallest
coin shows only a lion's paw. This new Lydian method of minting
moved the responsibility for checking the purity and weight of the
coins from the businessman to the ruler - a switch that made the
city of Sardis an easy, swift and extremely attractive place to do
business in. Because people could trust Croesus's coins, they used
them far beyond the boundaries of Lydia itself, giving him a new
kind of influence - financial power. Trust is of course a key
component of any coinage - you've got to be able to rely on the stated
value of the coin, and on the guarantee that it implies. It was
Croesus who gave the world its first reliable currency. The gold
standard starts here. The consequence was great wealth.
It was thanks to that wealth that Croesus was able to build the
great Temple of Artemis at Ephesus - the rebuilt version of which
became one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. But did
Croesus's money bring him happiness? We're told that he was
warned by a wise Athenian statesman that no man, however rich
and powerful, could be considered happy until he knew his end.
Everything would depend on whether he died happy.
Lydia was powerful and prosperous, but it was threatened from
the east by the rapidly expanding power of the Persians. Croesus
responded to this threat by seeking advice from the famed Oracle at
Delphi. He was told that, in the coming conflict, 'a great empire
would be destroyed' - the archetypa [ Delphic utterance that could be
interpreted either way. It was his own empire, Lydia, that was
conquered, and Croesus was captured by the great Persian king
Cyrus. In fact, his end wasn't so bad. Cyrus shrewdly appointed
Croesus as an adviser - I like to think as his financial adviser - and
the victorious Persians quickly adopted the Lydian model, spreading
Croesus's coins along the trade routes of the Mediterranean and Asia,
and then minting their own coins in pure gold and pure silver at
Croesus's mint in Sardis. It echoes the way the Kushites absorbed
Egyptian culture when they conquered their northern neighbour.
It's probably not a coincidence that coinage was invented at pretty
much the same time in China and in Turkey. Both developments
were responses to the fundamental changes seen across the world
around 3,000 years ago, from the Mediterranean to the Pacific. These
military, political and economic upheavals brought us not only
modern coinage, but something else that's resonated till the present
day - new ideas about how people and their rulers saw themselves.
In short, the beginning of modern political thinking, the world of
Confucius and Classical Athens. The next stage of that journey starts
with the empire that toppled Croesus - the Persians.