Who started coins as currency in the world?
Answer:
The answers above are all true.but East India Company spread it all over the world.
"The heritage of ancient coins is a subject that intrigues and delights collectors and scholars the world over. The oldest coin available today was discovered in Efesos, an ancient Hellenic city and prosperous trading center on the coast of Asia Minor."
first known usage of coins comes from the Kingdom of Lydia circa 643-630 B.C. Under three generations of Lydian kings, the money of Lydia gradually moved from being lumps of electrum (a naturally occurring alloy of silver and gold) to coins of a guaranteed weight and purity, marked with the seal of the King. True coins also developed very close to this time frame in both India and China.
in modern times, most coins are made of a base metal and their value comes strictly from their status as fiat money. This means that the value of the coin is decreed by government fiat rather than agreed by the people, which really makes it less a coin and more a token in the strictest sense.
To distinguish between these two types of coins, as well as from other forms of tokens which have been used as money, monetary scholars have defined three criteria that an object must meet to be a "true coin". These criteria are:
It must be made of a valuable material, and trade for close to the market value of that material.
It must be of a standardized weight and purity.
It must be marked to identify the authority that guarantees the content.
By the above definition, the invention and first known usage of coins comes from the Kingdom of Lydia circa 643-630 B.C. Under three generations of Lydian kings, the money of Lydia gradually moved from being lumps of electrum (a naturally occurring alloy of silver and gold) to coins of a guaranteed weight and purity, marked with the seal of the King. True coins also developed very close to this time frame in both India and China.
In 1979 and 1980, a Chinese architectural team excavating the region surrounding the ancient kingdom of Loulan discovered some Mesolithic stone tools and coins
The Archaic Origins of Coinage
The origin of ancient coins in the Mediterranean region is a problem fraught with a paucity of evidence yet demands an explanation. It is, indeed, a question concerning no less that the origin of the first coins in the world as Chinese coinage, which developed independently, did so approximately near the end of the 6th century, when coins in the Mediterranean were already well established. Credit for the development of the first coins often falls on either the Greek city states of Asia Minor or the Lydian kingdom. The latter, however, cannot be considered mutually exclusive from the Greek world, as Lydian culture had already been partially Hellenized by that period. Both in art and architecture Lydia had been influenced by Greek styles to the extent that it had a Greek agora in its capital Sardis.
There are several indications that Lydia was indeed fundamentally involved in the origin of coins in the Mediterranean world. Firstly, the material of the earliest known coins suggests a Lydian origin. The coin horde from the Ephesian Artemisium – a temple to the Goddess Artemis - and other finds throughout Asia Minor are consistently made of electrum. Electrum was an alloy of gold and silver that was available naturally in the silt of the river Paktolos which flows through Sardis[2] and was therefore a commodity largely controlled by the Lydian kings[3], but it should not be assumed that naturally occurring electrum was the sole source for early coins as there is evidence that the alloy of some Lydian coin issues were made of a controlled proportion of gold and silver, and there is evidence that during the first half of the 6th century B.C.E. gold and silver were being separated in Sardis. [4] Furthermore, later electrum issues from Cyzicus, Phokaea and Mytilene were composed of an artificially controlled ratio of gold to silver. This having been said, it would not be overstepping the evidence to suggest that the peculiarity of the usage of electrum for the first coins can be attributed to the inspiration offered by its natural occurrence in Lydia and so locating its origins therein.
Another indication that the earliest electrum coins were from Lydia is the distribution of weight standards to which they adhere. By far, the majority of early electurm finds, especially of those ninety-three pieces in the Artimision horde of Ephesus, conform to the Milesian weight standard, which was the weight standard of Lydia as well as the Ionian city-states of western Asia Minor. Only two coins from the Artimision horde are of a different weight standard, namely the Phokaic, and the usage of the seal (fwke) device on both makes the attribution to Phokaea even stronger.
Just as the usage of the seal suggests an attribution of the above two coins to Phokaea, the wide ranging (although not exclusive) use of the of the lion on many other early electrum specimens under the Milesian weight standard further suggests Lydia as their origin, as the symbol lion was closely associated with the royal Mermnad dynasty of Lydia. Forty seven (23 with lion’s head in profile, 22 with lion’s paw, 1 with lion’s head facing, and 1 with lion recumbent) of the ninety three pieces found at the Artemisium used either a lion’s head or lion’s paw as their symbol, and forty five other pieces from a horde found at Gordion also carry this symbol. With finds of the presumably Lydian style coinage in both Phrygia and Ionia, the coinage was seemingly widely used, but what motivated the minting of the first coinage is still uncertain. In recent decades a higher abundance of small fraction electrum coinage has been discovered, which puts to doubt earlier assumptions that the first coins were minted mainly for large transactions. Reasonable speculation suggests that the smaller fractional pieces, of which the smallest are tiny bits of metal at 1/96th of a stater, were issued for use as civil service pay and in turn accepted as payment for taxes. Minting of fractional denominations quickly increased, and considering that nearly every other piece in a 6th century B.C.E. horde of 906 coins from western Asia Minor used a different die, suggests a very large minting, perhaps in the millions. Nonetheless, the larger denominations were very likely used for expensive transactions, such as state purchasing of mercenaries or supplies, or as in the case of the Artimision horde where most of the lion head types are one-third staters, for wealthy dedicatory purposes.
The first country in the world to make metal coins was called Lydia, sometime around 650 BC, in the western part of what is now Turkey. The Lydian coins were made of a weighed amount of precious metal and were stamped with a picture of a lion. This idea soon spread to Greece, the rest of the Mediterranean, and the rest of the world. Coins were all made to the same size and shape. In some parts of the world, different things have been used as money, like clam shells or blocks of salt.
Ancient people had invented the coin system as there was baater system in ancient days,since the gold had the intrisic value all the buisness are done on that basis, thus the coin system existed.
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