money and coinage: The Middle East Long before coinage or paper currency was invented, people began trading commodities in standard measurements The most common precurrency gauges of value were units of grain measured by volume and silver measured by weight The standard units of weight were the shekel, which weighed about 0.3 ounces, and the biltu, or talent, which was the largest measure of weight-based value One talent of gold weighed between 50 and 100 pounds, depending on the time and place People were conducting exchanges in shekels and talents during Old Testament times, well before the advent of coinage in the sixth century b.c.e All metals were valuable, even in the days before they were made into coins Metals were measured in terms of their weight in silver; even gold was valued by its equivalent in silver Gold was considered the most precious metal and was valued at eight to 15 times its weight in silver Next came silver, lead, copper, and iron after its introduction around 1200 b.c.e Coins were not invented until about 600 b.c.e when the earliest electrum (an alloy of gold and silver found in nature) coins appeared in a hoard found in the temple of Artemis at Ephesus on the coast of Asia Minor, dating to the mid-sixth century b.c.e But the first silver and gold coins known in the Near East date to the reign of Croesus, king of Lydia (r ca 561–547 b.c.e.), whose fabulous wealth sparked the phrase “rich as Croesus,” used to this day Croesus’s capital was Sardis, and his Croesids, with their opposed lion and bull heads on one side and deeply impressed square shapes on the reverse, were staters varying in weight between and grams; there were also smaller denominations representing one-third, one-sixth, and one-twelth of a stater Soon the practice of minting and using coinage spread throughout Greece and, with Greek colonists, to Sicily, southern Italy, southern France and Spain But coinage also spread eastward In 546 b.c.e the Persian emperor Cyrus captured Sardis and took over its mints to produce Persian coins Darius I became emperor in 521 b.c.e and began issuing gold coins known as Darics These archer coins depicted an image of Darius running with a bow and spear The Persian emperor Xerxes the Great (r 486–465 b.c.e.) continued to issue Darics Darics were famous and desirable in the ancient world because of their high value; pure gold coins were rare Currency became more widely accepted during the Hellenistic Period (323–31 b.c.e.) Seleucid, Attalid, Ptolemaic, Parthian, and other monarchs established national systems of coinage, creating single sets of coins that could be used throughout their kingdoms They build national mints to produce all those coins to ensure consistency of weight and composition After Alexander the Great conquered the Persian emperor Darius III in 330 b.c.e., Persia and most of the Mesopotamian region adopted Greek coins or made local, imitative issues based on the Attic weight standard These coins were predominantly silver The main coins were the drachma and the tetradrachm Kingdoms throughout the region, including Pontus and Parthia, minted their own silver coins Parthian coins of the Hellenistic Period were produced at the 755 mints in Seleucia They typically depicted the king’s portrait on one side and the goddess Tyche or some other deity on the other, usually in some pose in which the goddess presented the king his crown The images on coins are an extremely useful source of information on the ancient world Persian satraps, or governors, often had their portraits stamped onto coins Coins are the only source of portraits of some rulers, such as the kings of Bactria in modern Pakistan Other coins contain religious imagery, such as depictions of gods THE RICHES OF CROESUS All the kingdoms of Asia Minor seemed fabulously wealthy to their European neighbors to the west, particularly to the Greeks, who turned this reputation into several legends that remain well known The biographer Plutarch and the poet Virgil describe King Midas of Phrygia and the famous blessing and curse that made everything he touched turn to gold The historian Herodotus, however, is the main source for the story of Croesus, whose wealth was an entirely historical fact, real and visible to the Greeks of the fifth and fourth centuries Croesus was king of Lydia around 560 B.C.E., ruling his kingdom between the Halys River and the Aegean Sea in Asia Minor Croesus was believed to be the wealthiest man ever to live; he was the origin of the expression “as rich as Croesus.” Before making major decisions, Croesus liked to consult the oracle at Delphi so that he could get advice from the god Apollo He also liked to send gifts to the temple before asking questions, perhaps thereby assuring himself of a positive reply Herodotus, writing a century after Croesus’ reign, provides this list of Croesus’ gifts to the temple: 117 ingots of gold, totaling 240 talents (18,000 pounds) in weight, a lion made of gold weighing 10 talents (750 pounds), a large bowl of gold and another of silver, each approximately 500 pounds, and various other gifts Finally, “along with these Croesus sent, besides many other offerings of no great distinction, certain round basins of silver, and a female figure five feet high, which the Delphians assert to be the statue of the woman who was Croesus’ baker Moreover, he dedicated his own wife’s necklaces and girdles.” Croesus came to a bad end; his kingdom was taken over by the Persians, and he threw himself (or someone threw him) onto a pyre to burn alive His treasures remained in the temples at Delphi until the middle of the fourth century, when they were melted down to pay for a vicious civil war over possession of the god’s shrine