subject: Ancient Greek Coins Collection [print this page] Ancient Greek Coins Collection Ancient Greek Coins Collection
The Greeks learned about coinage from the Lydians (their neighbors and inventors of the first coins). Between 500 B.C. and 400 B.C., Greece's various city-states produced some of the most beautiful coins the world has ever known. Early Greek coins are crude little bean-shaped pieces with punched designs of animals or other objects. But over time, the designs became more sophisticated and the beans flattened out into the thin, round pieces that are the hallmark of coins today.
During this period, the Greeks at Athens issued large silver coins called tetradrachms with a bug-eyed owl on one side. The owl was the symbol of the goddess Athena, who considered the bird sacred. In turn, Athena was revered by the people, who considered her sacred and named their city after her. The ultimate Greek coin was the impressive decadrachm, a large silver coin from Syracuse (Greece, not New York).
A drachm or drachma is the basic unit of Greek money, even in modern times. Tetra means four, so a tetradrachm equals four drachma. Also, because values of coins were based on their weight, a tetradrachm weighs exactly four times as much as a drachma. A decadrachm equaled ten drachma.
The Greeks employed interesting and unusual designs for their coins, including grapes, roses, wheat, eagles, crabs, dolphins, and rabbits, not to mention images of many of the Greek gods and goddesses. Yet while they made liberal use of images of gods and animals on their coins, they shunned portraits of real people. Even Alexander the Great's image never appeared on his own coins until after his death, and by then he had been converted to a god by many of his successors and fans. Some Greek coins show Alexander wearing a lion's head as a helmet; another shows him with the tusked head of an elephant atop his own head!
As Greek civilization declined, so did its coins. At one point, the Greeks became so desperate for metal for their coins that they made them out of bronze and then silver-plated them to make them look like their more valuable counterparts. They even melted down the statues of the goddess Nike to make gold coins.
