Coinage

Significantly, like the return of literacy, this was an invention from the East, but this time from closer to the Aegean, from an early state in non-Greek

Southwest Anatolia, sixth-century Lydia. If at first denominations were large and of precious metal, more useful for paying mercenaries or other payments by the state authorities, before long smaller bronze denominations were created, allowing, and indeed signifying for us, the use of money in everyday transactions for ordinary citizens. It is clear that marketing of products, as well as wage payments, must have become a major aspect of Archaic Greek life in town and country. This had a considerable effect on the power-structure of Archaic states. The EIA system where the elite controlled ownership of precious metal and circulated it through gift and marriage exchange was now threatened by a coinage, mainly in silver, which the city-state allowed commoners to accumulate. Coinage was dangerously meritocratic. Citizens of any class might take advantage of a more open land market and rising possibilities for additional riches through investing in industry and commerce. Self-made men with such achieved wealth could claim greater access to the political and judicial system (Kurke 1999).

It can still be claimed that coinage was essentially a Greek phenomenon in its emergence as a vital form of exchange in the ancient Mediterranean world (Howgego 1995), because the rapid spread of its production and use out of its early sixth-century creation in Lydia was purely due to its adoption in the Greek world. By 500 BC a whole series of centers in the Aegean and the Greek Western colonies were minting (Color Plate 9.1). The Persian Empire adopted the practice late from their Greek dependencies, and Italy outside the Greek colonies was very tardy in producing coins. Although a major factor in city minting was a statement of autonomy and to enable the state to pay its citizens and other employees, as well as to receive financial support in return, the general opinion supports a more radical primary reason for the precocious use in the Greek world: the occurrence in Archaic times of an economic revolution in which market activity (primarily literally in the city agora) became a central feature of life for all citizens.