Croesus of Lydia was responsible for one of the greatest innovations in coinage, but he did not invent coinage itself, an act with which he is often credited. If we assume that coinage was invented in 650 B.C. (of course we know it was only approximate), we take Croesus’ accession as 561 B.C., and then we relate Croesus’ times to our times in 2001, then on a relative basis, coinage would have been invented in 1907 during the presidency of Teddy Roosevelt. What Croesus was responsible for was the introduction of pure gold and pure silver as coinage metals (instead of electrum) and the invention of the first bi-metallic interrelated coinage system in the Greek world with denominations going from 10.75 gram gold and silver staters to fractions weighing as little as 0.36 grams in gold and silver. Croesus’ coinage type is familiar to most of us: a bellowing lion facing a seemingly placid bull. It seems that a fair amount of experimentation was done before final types were settled on, and I would not be surprised if more prototypes than I have identified yet exist in the earth or may have existed but not survived.

The earliest prototype in the Croesus series is a heavy gold stater (#120/1) of which I have owned two examples. It is such a perfect missing link that I would have been fearful of it had I not discovered a worn example in the Ashmolean Museum collection, placed there almost 100 years ago. In a way the Ashmolean specimen has been a negative for me personally as dealers in Europe and the U.S. have plagerized this idea by quoting the Ashmolean and stating, “Like Ashmolean must be the earliest Creosus gold Stater”. The prototype is of somewhat rough, crude style with the lion in a stretched, leaping position resembling the silver staters of Caria which had been found in hoards with coins of Croesus. The bull has a head similar to that of an Uncertain Ionian silver tetrobol (Rosen 376). The crowning glory that establishes this missing link is the fact that the lion has a wart on the bridge of the nose, just like the 1/3 staters of Lydia that preceded the coinage of Croesus. It is important to note that on the prototype piece the protomes are extremely animated in lifelike poses. On the regular issues (#120/2), while the protomes are well done, they are somewhat immobile and the front leg of the lion, as well as the front leg of the bull, are rather stiff acting like pedestals. (more…)