> [!info] Context [When did metal currency / metal commodity money first become a thing people used?](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/kpyt5c/when_did_metal_currency_metal_commodity_money/) via [[rAskHistorians|AskHistorians]] > - [n] Update: ['World's oldest' coin factory discovered in China | National Geographic](https://www.nationalgeographic.co.uk/history-and-civilisation/2021/08/worlds-oldest-coin-factory-discovered-in-china) I thought I had read somewhere that Phoenicia, as an important center of the metals trade in ancient times, was one of the early inventors of metal currency, but when I went digging I could only dig up vague stuff like: > These issues with commodities led people to create coins out of precious metals to use as money. No one knows for sure who first invented such money, but historians believe metal objects were first used as money as early as 5,000 B.C. > > Around 700 B.C., the Lydians became the first Western culture to make coins. Other countries and civilizations soon began to mint their own coins with specific values. Using coins with set values made it easier to compare values and trade money for goods and services. > > <cite> <a href="https://wonderopolis.org/wonder/who-invented-money">Wonderopolis</a></cite> Wikipedia says the first metal coins were invented in India, but surely we know more about the history metal as having set value-per-weight for the _four thousand year period_ that's being handwaved here. Also, am I crazy for thinking that I read somewhere once that Phoenician control of the early metals trade led to the early use of metal coinage? [This website](https://theconversation.com/when-and-why-did-people-first-start-using-money-78887) claims that the first metal coins (shekels) were created in Mesopotamia, but that Lydia had the first _mints._ Having exhausted my ability to find answers via Google, I'm coming here, because you guys can generally be trusted to actually know your stuff. **For real this time, when did metal currency / metal commodity money first become a thing people used?** > Let me start with a little bit of misinformation that you seem to have picked up online. The first coins were absolutely not created in Mesopotamia or India. I am assume these claims result from people seeing 'first' as some claim to pride - they also aren't Greek, a common misconception. > > There is a little bit of ambiguity because there is some overlap between the way coins work and way commodity moneys work, and likely coins originated in places already familiar with commodity money. For example, when exactly does a piece of metal of standard weight and purity stop being an ingot and become a coin? > > However in numismatics (the discipline that studies physical manifestations of money) there is fairly wide agreement among experts that coins were independently invented in three different places in Asia - Lydia (modern Turkey), Pakistan/Afghanistan, and China. The reason that these are thought to be independent inventions is that they each use a different technology for the manufacture of coins - and are sometimes referred to as the Lydian, Indian, or Chinese traditions. > > Starting with China, which I suspect (personal opinion not fact) is the oldest, in the seventh century BC. These coins are made by casting in a mold. Casting technologies vary a lot and changed over time. Initially the coins looked like tools, and are known, for example, as knife money or spade money. They probably began in communities that had used tools as commodity money. In Lydia the first coins were made from lumps of electrum and were die struck, that is the lump was hammered into a negative die to create a pictorial impression. Initially the hammering was done with a bundle of rods but people rapidly adopted the idea of using two dies, placing the coin in between and hitting the top one with a hammer. The first of these were also made in the seventh century BC. The first coins in Pakistan/Afghanistan led to what is known as punch marking. Punch marked coins are usually made by cutting blanks from a thin sheet of metal and then making a series of small punches, usually symbols, one one side. Traditionally the origin of these were dated to the fifth/sixth century BC (no serious scholar thinks they are as old as the Lydian or Chinese) because coins feature in so many stories about the Buddha and his traditional birth date is 563 BC. However just as scholars have questioned whether the Buddha might be a much later figure, they have argued that coins may have originated in South Asia much later (Joe Cribb in particular has made this argument [https://www.academia.edu/33778310/](https://www.academia.edu/33778310/)). This doesn't really change whether the invention was independent as it seems unlikely the punch marking technique could have originated anywhere widely familiar with either Chinese cast coins or Lydian style die struck. > > There is a popular British Museum book called _Money: A History_, I think usually listed as authored by Catherine Eagleton (actually by a range of staff), which might interest you. It is associated with the money gallery of that museum (which was quite a radical departure from the conventional coin galleries of museums when it was first developed). I worked on the redesign of that gallery about a decade ago. And one of the corrective elements was to make this origin story much clearer - first of all to make clear the difference between coins and money (not all coin is money, not all money is coin) and that money is much much older than coins; second to make clear the independent invention of coinage in these three locations, and the strong possibility China was the earliest; and the third to try and correct some of the cultural prejudice you encountered. The Lydian tradition would be adopted in the Persian and Greek world and ultimately spread to the Roman and to India (displacing the punch mark technique). It would come to define the European sense of what a coin looks like, and after mechanization what all coins look like. As a result you can find lots of claims the Greeks 'invented' coinage, and such a notion was certainly implied in earlier versions of the gallery. > > Now please don't ask me why coinage was invented. I don't really have any idea and I am not convinced by any of the answers I have heard, which all seem overly glib and none really explain why three groups of people would independently come to the same technology at about the same moment. > <div></div> > <cite>u/Robert_Bacey</cite> Thank you so much! You have saved me, I suspect, an immeasurable amount of frustration trying to get a sensible answer out of the internet, and I learned a ton. I put _Money: A History_ on my wishlist :) I absolutely love the idea of {tool} money and am eager to go further down the rabbit hole of learning more about numismatics (I didn't know there was a word for it!) with your incredibly helpful direction to guide me.