A guide to the principal gold and silver coins of the ancients ...

SELECT GREEK AND ROMAN COINS.
PERIOD I.—CIRCA B.C. 700-480.
About seven hundred years before the Christian era
the Lydians in Asia Minor, at that time ruled by the
illustrious dynasty of the Mermnadse, first began to
stamp small ingots of their native gold ore, obtained from
the washings of the river Pactolus, with an official mark
as a guarantee of just weight, thus rendering an appeal
to the scales on every fresh transaction no longer a
matter of necessity. These stamped ingots were the
first coins.
The official marks on these earliest of all coins consisted
merely of the impress of the rude unengraved
punches, between which the ingot was placed to receive
the blow of the hammer. Very soon, however, the art of
the engraver was called in to adorn the lower of the two
dies, that of the obverse, with the badge of the state or the
symbol of the local divinity under whose auspices the currency
was issued, the earliest mints having been, it is generally
supposed, within the sacred precincts of a temple.
The Greek cities which studded the coasts and islands of
Asia Minor soon adopted and improved upon this simple
but none the less remarkable Lydian invention, and to
the Greeks the credit is probably due of substituting
engraved dies for the primitive punches, and certainly of
inscribing them with the name of the people or ruler by
whom the coin was issued.
In European Greece, Phidon, king of Argos, is said to
have been the first to introduce standard weights and
measures, on which occasion he dedicated bars of metal,