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6 Things Ancient Coins Taught Us
6 Things Ancient Coins Taught Us
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0:00
Money. It makes the world go round.
0:02
Tails.
0:04
Today, we can use things like Venmo and credit cards to pay for things.
0:08
But for a long time, everyone’s money pretty much looked like this.
0:13
People have been making coins since around the 7th century BCE.
0:16
Since then, they’ve been used nearly
0:18
continuously in the West as currency.
0:20
Sometimes, these ancient coins resurface.
0:22
And even though we can’t use a Roman denarius or a
0:25
Spanish piece-of-eight to pay for a cup of coffee, this old money
0:29
holds a treasure trove of information for archeologists and historians.
0:33
So let’s dig through humanity’s coin collection
0:35
and learn seven six things money can teach us about the past.
0:38
[♪INTRO]
0:41
The most immediate thing you can learn
0:43
from ancient coins is about coins themselves.
0:46
I know. Very meta.
0:47
Coins are, obviously, just pieces of stamped metal that we all agree
0:50
are valuable. People today instinctively connect coins with money.
0:54
Think: Scrooge McDuck diving into a pool of gold coins.
0:57
But there is nothing inherent about stamped metal being money.
1:01
Money is anything that people exchange for goods and services.
1:04
People have used lots of different things as
1:06
money, like shells, beads, and even cigarettes.
1:08
So, why have so many people made coins to use as this?
1:13
Weirdly, we don’t know exactly when people started using coins.
1:17
So far, the oldest coins we’ve found were minted
1:20
in modern-day Turkey around 600 BCE.
1:23
They were made of electrum,
1:24
a combination of gold and silver,
1:26
so they had plenty of value as-is.
1:28
And the stamp on their surface was the official seal of
1:31
the state saying that it was legit, and that seal also worked as
1:35
a promise that the issuer would back the value of the coin.
1:38
More importantly, that stamp meant that the issuer
1:40
would buy the coins back from whoever had them,
1:43
giving that person credit on their accounts, or an IOU, or something.
1:47
The whole metal-money idea took off, and soon,
1:50
a bunch of the nation states of the
1:51
eastern Mediterranean were doing it.
1:53
Before long, coins were everywhere.
1:54
And archaeologists can use them to infer some
1:57
surprising things about the ancient past.
1:59
Like the state of the economy.
2:00
Take this coin, kept at the Worcester County Museum in the UK.
2:04
It’s a Roman, or at least Roman-inspired,
2:06
silver coin dating from the 1st century CE.
2:08
You’ll notice it has a hole punched through it, and it’s not the only one.
2:12
Somewhere around 60% of old Roman coins found
2:15
outside the region of Kent dating to the Anglo-Saxon
2:18
period have been pierced or altered in some way.
2:21
Why? Well, some historians think that after the Roman army left
2:24
the islands, all their Roman money became pretty much worthless.
2:28
But even if nobody on the islands wanted to
2:30
use them as money, they were still nice to look at.
2:33
So, instead of using them for barter,
2:34
people used their shiny coins as decoration.
2:37
Turning coins into jewelry is a big sign that your
2:40
economy isn’t using the metal coins as currency,
2:43
and that you’ve shifted away to something else entirely.
2:46
But you can also see evidence of
2:47
economic trouble in other Roman coins.
2:49
For instance, there’s a Roman dinarius from the 1st century BCE,
2:53
minted during a tough moment for Rome.
2:55
The Republic was at war, in debt, and at risk of going bankrupt.
2:59
And researchers have found evidence of
3:00
this crisis in the coins minted at the time.
3:03
See, all these Roman coins were supposed to be made of pure silver.
3:08
But it looks like by 87 BCE, the Roman mint was
3:12
deliberately adding between 5-10% copper to the mix.
3:16
This meant the coins literally weren’t
3:18
worth what they had been a few years ago.
3:20
Turns out inflation’s been a problem for a while.
3:23
But coins tell us a lot more than the state of the economy.
3:26
We can use them to gain insight into what metals people
3:29
had available to them, how advanced their metallurgy was,
3:32
and even where those metals were coming from.
3:35
Take this silver tetradrachm from ancient Athens.
3:37
For a long time, researchers had assumed that early
3:40
Athenians got this metal from silver mines in northern Greece,
3:44
since they were right there, and it makes sense.
3:47
Why get imported silver, when you’ve got silver at home?
3:50
Except, it looks like they didn’t use those mines.
3:52
Or at least, not in the beginning.
3:54
A recent analysis of the tiny levels of things like lead, zinc,
3:58
and gold in some of the oldest Athenian coins suggests
4:01
that they were made from silver that was mined
4:04
as far away as Spain, France, Romania, and Turkey.
4:07
The Athenians were only able to get control of local mines and
4:10
start producing their own silver around the time they started
4:13
making their iconic owl coins, meaning that early Athens
4:17
would have had to import its way to influence.
4:19
And coins can even tell us what metals weren’t around.
4:22
Take this Spanish real dating from between 1772 and 1825,
4:27
found in Jamestown.
4:28
You might be wondering what Spanish money is doing in
4:30
the burgeoning United States, and no, it’s not pirates.
4:34
Turns out, when European colonizers came to North America,
4:37
they didn’t just bring smallpox and a superiority complex.
4:40
Because while what’s now the United States
4:42
was rich in a lot of resources, they didn’t have any
4:45
precious metals for the early colonizers to mine.
4:47
And when the U.S. first became a country,
4:49
there wasn’t any metal to use to make AmeriCoins.
4:53
So without a way to make their own coins,
4:55
people just used the money from other countries.
4:57
That only changed in 1857, when Congress banned the use of other
5:01
money and declared the U.S. Dollar as the only legal tender in the U.S.
5:05
All I'm saying is we chould have gone with AmeriCoins.
5:08
It does roll off the tongue more than 'dollar'.
5:10
Hey, speaking of government,
5:11
let’s talk about what coins tell us about both politics and propaganda.
5:15
Coins were almost always made by people with power.
5:17
And the images that powerful people chose to stamp onto
5:20
those coins can tell us about their priorities, or even their fears.
5:24
The first faces that went on coins were, of course, the gods.
5:27
Who wouldn’t want a little deific help with their business transactions?
5:30
And for a while, it was only gods on currency.
5:34
The first coin to have the head of an actual person,
5:37
rather than that of a god, was the Persian commander Tissaphernes,
5:41
who lived around 400 BCE.
5:43
These portraits of actual humans give us some idea
5:46
of what powerful people looked like back in the day.
5:49
And also, what they were trying to accomplish.
5:51
Take this denarius from the year 44 BCE.
5:53
Julius Caesar was the first living Roman to put his head on a coin.
5:57
This was a big power play, since at the time it was
6:00
really taboo to put the face of a mortal on coins.
6:03
He then upped the stakes by putting the words “Dictator for Life" on the coin.
6:08
Which was technically true, since he
6:10
was a dictator for the rest of his life.
6:12
But that victory lap may have been a bit premature,
6:15
since he was assassinated just days
6:17
after his dictator-coin was minted.
6:19
While this was probably as far from a lucky penny
6:22
as anyone may ever get, he did set a precedent.
6:25
With the rise of the Roman Empire,
6:26
emperors took to putting their heads on coins,
6:29
which is a trend that other monarchs continue to this day.
6:32
And that’s great for archaeologists, since it means that we
6:35
know who was in charge of the place when the coin was made.
6:38
Like, there are four different rulers from the
6:40
eighth century that we literally only know about
6:43
because they showed up on Anglo-Saxon coins.
6:46
They can also show us shifting values.
6:48
One of the best examples of this is how French coins changed
6:51
over the progression of the French Revolution.
6:53
Coins from 1789, when the revolution began, show a portrait of King
6:57
Louis the 16th surrounded by the words “King By the Grace of God.”
7:01
When Louis was imprisoned in 1792,
7:04
he still got to be on the coins, since was technically the king.
7:08
But instead of bragging about his divine right to rule,
7:11
the coins were instead inscribed with “The Nation, Law, and the King.”
7:16
I imagine that the “in that order” part is silent.
7:18
Louis was executed the following year,
7:20
and French coin makers stopped putting
7:22
the head of state onto their coins.
7:24
At least, they did until Napoleon seized power later that century,
7:28
and then we’re back to faces on money.
7:30
I guess in a coin toss, Napoleon would be choosing heads.
7:34
If you’ve ever thrifted a cool jacket and found
7:36
the previous owner’s spare change in the pocket,
7:38
you might know something about this next one.
7:40
Because, just like that change tells you a bit about
7:42
the last time the jacket was worn,
7:44
archaeologists can use ancient coins to
7:47
figure out how old a dig site might be.
7:49
Like, if one of the coins in that sick jean jacket was a penny from 1987,
7:54
you know that your lucky thrift find had
7:56
to have been worn some time during or after 1987.
8:00
And this works in the more distant past, too.
8:02
For instance, there’s a trove of 22 coins
8:04
that researchers recently found in tunnels near
8:07
an ancient village in Galilee.
8:08
Full disclosure: At the time we’re writing this script,
8:11
this paper hasn’t been peer reviewed, but the findings from their
8:14
press releases are cool enough that we want to talk about it anyway.
8:17
Archeologists knew that the Jewish people in the area would
8:19
use these tunnels to hide when things got violent,
8:22
especially during two noteworthy uprisings
8:24
against the occupying Romans in the first and second centuries CE,
8:28
which didn’t really end well for those the Jewish people.
8:31
But it seems like people kept using those
8:34
tunnels for centuries after those two losses.
8:36
We know this because those coins were made in the 4th century CE,
8:40
well after the two noteworthy uprisings.
8:42
The existence of these coins suggests that the tunnels
8:45
were also being used during the third and final Jewish
8:48
revolt that started midway through the 4th century CE.
8:51
Jewish people could hide here, regroup,
8:53
pray, all out of sight of the occupying Roman military.
8:56
And oddly enough, using coins to date sites can be even
9:00
more accurate than other methods, like carbon dating.
9:03
That’s because carbon dating is best suited to stuff
9:05
that’s a lot older than coins, so it doesn’t tend to work
9:08
as well on material that’s only a few hundred years old.
9:12
You can get the century, just about, but decades are harder.
9:15
But coins with dates on them can help narrow that window down.
9:19
Recently, archeologists working at an Inuit site
9:21
in Quebec were able to use a coin to work out that
9:25
the site was probably active some time in the 1630s,
9:29
but that’s just too young for carbon dating alone to close the gap.
9:32
Lucky for them, someone at the site way back then
9:35
threw away a French coin showing the head of Louis the 14th,
9:39
which was minted between 1632 and 1634.
9:42
Although the Inuit who lived here clearly didn’t think much of this coin,
9:45
because the archeologists literally found it in a trash heap.
9:48
Guess they felt it wasn’t worth much.
9:50
Kind of like how we think of pennies today.
9:52
And while using coins to date sites can be really helpful,
9:56
it’s not always foolproof.
9:57
Case in point: the Maria Theresa Thaler.
10:00
These Thaler coins were first minted under the rule of
10:02
Empress Maria Theresa of the Holy Roman Empire.
10:05
But over the years, they became the currency-du-jour
10:08
in many parts of the Middle East and the horn of Africa.
10:11
The Austrian mint continues to make exact copies of this coin to
10:16
this day, including the date 1780 and the Empress's headshot.
10:20
So if you found Maria Theresa’s face in your jacket pocket,
10:22
you can be confident that the jacket was worn after the year 1780.
10:27
But it might be hard to tell much more than that.
10:29
Before we get to the next one,
10:30
it’s time for us to earn a few coins of our own
10:32
with a quick ad break.
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11:26
Aside from telling the age of a dig site,
11:28
coins are a great way to look at ancient trade routes.
11:31
Since the ancient world didn’t have those airport kiosks
11:35
where you could exchange your currency,
11:36
that meant travelers and merchants ended up paying for goods using
11:40
their own country’s money, even when they were way over the border.
11:43
For instance, archaeologists working at a dig site in northwestern
11:46
China uncovered Roman coins from the 1st century CE,
11:50
which means that ancient Rome and China were connected through
11:54
whatever series of trade networks stretched across Eurasia.
11:57
We’ve since learned that Romans were obsessed with Chinese silk.
12:00
The two groups probably didn’t directly interact,
12:03
but they were connected through a series of interconnected
12:06
trade routes stretching all across Eurasia,
12:08
mainly to bring fancy fabric to the European masses.
12:11
What would you call that? Some sort of...
12:13
silk road?
12:15
It turns out, lots of people we don’t tend to think of as
12:17
being connected were trading with one another.
12:20
In the 1980s, archeologists in Sweden discovered a hoard of
12:23
Islamic coins at a Viking burial site dating back to the 9th century,
12:28
meaning they too were connected through trade networks,
12:31
whether direct or indirect.
12:32
More recently, a study uncovered a previously unknown trade
12:35
network that ran through southeast Asia in the 1st millennium.
12:38
The researchers looked at the similarities between
12:40
almost 250 silver coins, found in several different countries.
12:44
They all shared certain religious motifs,
12:47
like a rising sun, which made the researchers
12:49
suspect they may have been connected.
12:51
In fact, they were really connected. Two of the coins –
12:54
one found in Bangladesh and the other in Myanmar –
12:56
were probably made by the same person, or at the very least,
13:00
using the same die.
13:01
Talk about your art reaching a wide audience.
13:03
Our last example is one of the other worst things
13:05
to bring up at a dinner party, besides money and politics –
13:08
Religion.
13:09
If you compare coins from Islamic cultures and Christian ones,
13:12
you might notice an odd difference.
13:14
During the Middle Ages, most of the coins from the Muslim world
13:17
don’t have any images on them whatsoever, just calligraphy.
13:20
And we pretty much know exactly when this became a trend.
13:23
In 696 CE, Caliph Abd al Malik, fifth Caliph of the Islamic Empire,
13:28
minted the first coin in hundreds of years
13:31
that had no symbolic images on them whatsoever.
13:34
One theory as to why he did this was to separate his empire
13:37
and its values from that of the Christian Byzantine Empire.
13:40
Byzantine coins often portrayed the emperor du jour alongside
13:43
Christian images, but not a lot of writing,
13:46
since the people in the empire spoke a lot of languages.
13:49
These new text-only Islamic coins were a flex because they
13:53
showed that Arabic had become a uniting language for their empire,
13:57
and that people who used the coins were literate.
13:59
Which isn't to say that the Caliph didn’t
14:01
want you to know he was in charge.
14:04
The coins also said that he was “God’s Deputy,”
14:07
so taking his face off the coins wasn’t exactly about humility.
14:10
At least if your money comes right out and says it,
14:12
nobody needs to offer you a penny for your thoughts.
14:15
From spreading political messages to making fancy decorations,
14:18
there’s a lot that people have done with coins throughout the centuries.
14:22
And clearly, that’s been great for us today,
14:24
since those coins give us so many insights
14:26
into the people who made them.
14:28
Our quarters aren’t made of silver, and our pesos aren’t gold.
14:30
But that doesn’t mean they won’t have value to future historians.
14:33
Think about what our many different coins
14:35
will tell people about what we valued and why.
14:38
But let’s be real. It’s mostly going to be pennies. So, so many pennies.
14:43
[♪OUTRO]
14:54
It was tails!
