The first coins were too valuable to buy a loaf of bread
Some of the earliest coins, struck in western Anatolia in the late 600s BC, were made of electrum, a natural blend of gold and silver. Even the smallest might have equalled a day's subsistence, far too much for everyday shopping. They may have begun as badges or ritual tokens rather than pocket change.
Electrum was an awkward material for money. Its gold content wandered, typically somewhere around 40 to 55 percent, so no two lumps were worth quite the same, and early pieces were not even standardised in weight. Most carried no writing, only an animal emblem. One exception, a type also buried beneath the Artemis temple at Ephesus, bears a Greek legend claiming to be the badge of Phanes, a name that might belong to a mercenary, a god or simply a leading citizen.
The kingdom of Lydia gets most of the credit. Coins were minted there for King Alyattes, and Herodotus called the Lydians the first to use gold and silver coins and the first retailers. Alyattes' successor Croesus, whose name became shorthand for wealth, is credited with the first gold coins of reliable purity and with running gold and silver side by side around 550 BC. When Cyrus the Great conquered Lydia after 546 BC, he inherited the invention and kept striking its lion-and-bull designs before Persia issued its own gold daric.
Other places have rival claims. In Bronze Age China, bronze copies of cowrie shells served as currency tokens, and a factory at Guanzhuang in Henan turned out spade-shaped bronze coins between 640 and 550 BC, the oldest securely dated mint yet found. The Greek island of Aegina struck turtle coins perhaps around 700 BC. Before any of this, traders weighed out ingots and silver bars, and coins were largely a way to skip the scales.
Stamped metal invited cheating, such as shaving slivers off the edges. Modern coins sidestep that by being base metal whose worth is set by law. When inflation pushes the metal above face value, people melt or hoard them. Coins still earn their place because they last about 30 years, while a banknote wears out in roughly four.
Source: Coin
