Old coins still valuable
MúzeumCafé 10.
The National Museum has a collection of ancient Greek coins numbering about ten thousand. They include items from the birth of minting in the 6th century BC to 294 AD, when the mint in Alexandria, the last provincial one in the Roman Empire, closed and a uniform monetary system was established throughout the empire. Coinage began in the western part of Asia Minor (today western Anatolia, Turkey) where the first coins were found in the territory of the former Lydian kingdom. Herodotus ascribed the ‘invention’ to the Lydians, King Croesus (c 560-547 BC) striking the first gold and silver coins. Thus scholars in early 19th century attributed to him the gold and silver coins, still regarded as the earliest, with their facing protomes of a lion and a bull. These coins can be traced back to prototypes in the Middle East, and the time sequence of the coin findings confirms this attribution. Yet they were not really the first real coins, since at their time various coins of electrum (a gold and silver alloy, which could be panned from the River Pactolus crossing the Lydian capital) already existed, not only in Lydia but also in the Ionian towns along the shore of Asia Minor. Today the attribution to King Croesus is questioned, since it has turned out that the late series of coins with the lion and bull were struck by Persian rulers, and by Kyros who overthrew the Lydian kingdom, until the great king Dareios introduced gold dareikos coins bearing his name and the image of him in a crouching run with spear and bow. These Persian gold coins represented the gold currency of the ancient world in an almost unchanged form for nearly 200 years up to the Hellenistic Age, when the Macedonian kings – King Phillip II and his son the legendary Alexander the Great – and then the following Hellenistic dynasties regularly minted their own gold coins. The majority of coins minted during the city-state period were of silver, the striking of which spread incredibly quickly in the Hellenistic world. Ancient Greek coins were primarily made of precious metals and despite their small size they are real masterpieces of art and thus have always represented high value for collectors. Since they are rare among Hungarian finds, the majority of the museum’s compilation derive from former private collections. However, on one occasion in the early 20th century the Hungarian state decided to increase the number of these tiny carriers of universal culture and that was when the collection’s only Croesus gold coin was purchased. In the main, the growth of the Greek collection is due to two private collectors: István Delhaes (1843–1901), a noted painter of his day who lived in Vienna, and Count Miklós Dessewffy (1854–1918), whose name was mentioned in connection with Celtic coins in MúzeumCafé’s first issue of 2009. They extended the museum’s collection with some 2,300 Greek coins. The most valuable part comprised magnificent coins from the Greek colonies of southern Italy and Sicily. The Athenian coins depicting an owl were already copied in the Middle East including Egypt under Persian rule at the end of the 5th century BC. In the 470s BC the Syracusan coin image depicting a victorious chariot driver appears on several coins of Sicilian cities, reflecting the far-reaching power of the Syracusan despots. Simultaneously, freedom from an alien power could be commemorated with new, independent images. By the end of the 4th century BC the significance of local city mints had decreased. The majority of them only produced coins for local use, while striking precious metal became the monopoly of the Hellenistic rulers.