but why as civilized and great as Egypt was. Why did they not mint coins?

[Joe Geranio]

The Ancient Egyptians didn't use currency; they bartered. The Greeks introduced currency to Egypt.  I only collect coins from Rome early first century, but why as civilized and great as Egypt was did they not mint coins?

[Victor C]

They didn't realize that they needed currency as payment in kind worked fine. Even the Romans frequently used payment in kind.

[Robert_Brenchley]

Some of the owls may have been minted in Egypt.

[Joe Geranio]

What about Greeks or foreginers that worked in Egypt under the Ptolemys, even unto Cleopatra's time?  Did this work for them also.   Thanks for the other responses.

Joe   

[Rich Beale]

Actually, you will find that the Ptolemies issued a very extensive series of coinage in gold, silver and bronze. Indeed, even before the Ptolemaic dynasty, there were limited issues of currency. Search for Nektanebo.

[Joe Geranio]

Were these circulated in Egypt?

[bpmurphy]

Unfortunately a search for nektanebo pulls up a lot of coins that are wrongly attributed to him. The bronzes typically attributed to nektanebo are Syrian not Egyptian. The gold coins are probably egyptian but you won't find many of those online.

Barry Murphy

[Joe Geranio]

Thanks Barry.

[djmacdo]

For thousands of years before contact with the Greeks, Egypt minted not coins.  In the fifth century they did mint owls, probably chiefly to pay Greek mercenaries, and then in the Hellenistic period, when Greeks and Macedonians ruled Egypt, many coins were minted.  But what about those thousands of years between about 3100 B.C. and 500 B.C. when no coins were struck in Egypt?

Egypt, like the other pre-Greek Near Eastern river valley civilizations, was a highly centralized absolute monarchy.  Goods flowed from the producers to the government, and from there they were redistributed to the people.  For this, no coins were needed.  There always was, of course, some private exchange, but it was largely local and relatively minor.  When precious metals were used in private lives, the metals were often crafted into jewelry in convenient weights, so that if necessity arouse, the jewelry could be easily traded in the market place.  Throughout the Near East today, jewelry is still often crafted into convenient weights.  Barter and trade seems to have worked well in pre-Greek Egypt, so well in fact that when silver coins were introduced to Egypt from the Greek world, the coins were usually treated like any other piece of metal, just a raw commodity.  Coins are found in the early Egyptian hoards with raw metal in lump or ingot form and/or with jewelry, either intact pieces or cut up.  It is really only when the Greeks ruled Egypt late in Egyptian history that coins came into common circulation as coins rather than just pieces of bullion.

Mac

[Salem Alshdaifat]

We shouldent forget that Egypt havent been ruled by Egyptians for along time , the Persian ruled around 530 B.C till Alexander the Great conquest, before that the Egyptians under the 26th dynasty rule used the Athenian coinage since it was the common coinage at that time, and they did imitate those coins .
after that Egypt was under outsider rule .
best.
Salem Alshdaifat

[Joe Geranio]

Thanks to all, very educational.

[Matt Kreuzer]

Joe,

If one thinks of coins as metal object that were manufactured, it is not a surprise that few were made in Egypt.

     "The fertile but metal-poor Nile Valley produced regular harvests for export.  At the same time, these exports attracted the attention of powerful foreign interests.  Egypt had little fuel and only minimal smelting and metalworking.  Wood and metal were imported, making metal working more expensive than elsewhere.  Stone weapons were still used well after the comparatively late introduction of iron, circa 600 BC.  Jewelry items which were metal in other cultures, were made of ceramic or glass in Egypt.  Egypt was the last civilization on the Mediterranean to produce its own metal coinage.  Porcelain and lead were used for some later Egyptian tokens."

It was convenient for Egyptians to focus on strengths such as raising grain, and to trade with others for mercenaries, silver, wood, coins, etc.  Can we compare this to modern times?  I live near New York City.  While NYC is wealthy and influential, the city imports its coinage comes from Philadephia and Denver.  These locations provide better locations for production of coins.  The location of factories and mints is based on factors including:  past location, security, connection to financial and political officials, logistics, cost of fuel, cost of skilled and unskilled labor, access to metal, etc.  Since wood was an import to Egypt, it is not a surprise that worked metal was also an import.

Matt Kreuzer

[Joe Geranio]

Thanks to all for your thoughts.    All informative.    I stick to Julio Claudian coins only, and believe me this is enough for a lifetime!

[Lloyd Taylor]

Unfortunately a search for nektanebo pulls up a lot of coins that are wrongly attributed to him. The bronzes typically attributed to nektanebo are Syrian not Egyptian. The gold coins are probably egyptian but you won't find many of those online.

Barry - interesting to read that this view is gathering some acceptance in the numismatic trade. It'd been raised earlier  https://www.forumancientcoins.com/board/index.php?topic=66669.0 and I think you are the first dealer to deny, let alone openly acknowledge the problematic of the Nektanebo bronze attribution. An abundance of the type has come to the market in recent months in numbers that make an Egyptian attribution (essentially a non-monetized economy in the early-mid fourth century) attribution improbable.  

Is there now an emerging consensus on the probable 1st century AD Syrian origin of these bronzes?

And a broader question - by what process does a formerly acceptable attribution (more a piece of dogma in the instance of the Nektanebo AE's) get overturned other than by a breakthrough scholarly paper that gains immediate acceptance? Does it come about, as seems possible in this case, by a growing acceptance of the error of the original interpretation.  Another example of the issue, we have quite a few of these sorts of misattribution problems in the Alexander series e.g. the persistence of Aradus attributions in the trade of some Alexandrine coinage despite the scholarly work that proves a Babylonia origin under Seleukos (Babylon II and Babylonian Uncertain Mint 6A) - no one is likely to rework Price's magnum opus any time some so the errors contained therein (another example with the early dated Ake series now attributed to Tyre) revealed by recent studies seem likely to persist in the trade for a long time to come?

[Lloyd Taylor]

Following image: the first and only indisputably authentic coin type that I would classify as possibly Egyptian, (albeit under Persian rule) bearing as it does Egyptian Demotic script. The Demotic legend suggests that it was targeted for use by Egyptian natives as opposed to Persian occupiers, or Greek mercenaries. Even so, the Athenian/Greek inspiration is apparent and it was struck under Perisan rule. So ultimately like all other indisputably authentic ancient coinage struck in Egypt it is only Egyptian by mint location rather than inspiration.

EGYPT, Achaemenid Province. Artaxerxes III Okhos. As Pharaoh of Egypt, 343/2-338/7 BC. AR Tetradrachm (21mm, 17.07 g, 8h). Imitating Athens. Helmeted head of Athena right / Owl standing right, head facing; olive spray and crescent to left, "Artaxerxes king" in demotic script to right. Van Alfen Type I (unlisted dies); SNG Copenhagen (Ptolemies) 2. VF, flat strike on obverse, test cut on reverse. Very rare, only 17 coins of this series noted by Van Alfen.

In answer to your original question: The Egyptians like all other advanced civilization preceding the early 7th century BC were a non monetized society utilizing barter for day to day economic transactions and bullion for higher value transactions. Coinage only came into being as means of economic transaction in the western world by an innovation in Lydia in the late seventh to early sixth century BC. From there it spread through the Greek and to a lesser extent the Perisian (Achaemenid) civilizations.  The Egyptians, as an essentially closed society and economy at the time, did not pick up on this innovation, which was introduced ultimately to the country via Persian (Achaemenid)  conquest. At least that is how I see it, notwithstanding the existence of a few "Nektanebo gold staters", which in the opinion of some numismatists are of doubtful authenticity and more likely a product of 19th century forgery targeted at meeting the very lucrative expectations of the Egyptologists of the era.

[Joe Geranio]

Wow, look at the script!!  Awesome, never seen this. 

[rick2]

as far as I know coinage was invented in the 5th or 6th century BC so the egyptians would not have been the only major civilization who went without a coinage at the time.


even the romans went for 200 years without coinage from 700BC til 500Bc when it was first introduced


it had simply not been invented

it s like asking how could we survive in the 1970ies and 1980ies without the internet

[Joe Geranio]

I was speaking late into the ptolemac period, Time of Cleopatra and Caesar? 

[PtolemAE]

I was speaking late into the ptolemac period, Time of Cleopatra and Caesar? 

The Ptolemies introduced the first extensive coinage and monetary system to Egypt in about 315BC - gold, silver, and bronze.  And kept it going for nearly 300 years - down to Cleo the VII.  There were *huge* numbers of coins produced and they have been studied in depth.  They had extensive mint operations in Alexandria, Kyrene, Cyprus, Tyre, Sidon, Corinth, Helicarnassos, Sicily, Ephesos, Ake-Ptolemais, and possibly other locations.  Only the Alexandria mint seems to have been active continuously over the entire 300 years with the others minting sometimes sporadically.  Entire books and large academic study projects have been devoted to the structure and economic purposes of money in Ptolemaic Egypt (taxes, payment for goods, military, etc.).  Google almost any combination of words related to this and you'll have no trouble learning all you'd ever want to know about coinage of Ptolemaic Egypt.

For pictures of many of the bronze coin types from many of the mints, see:

www.ptolemybronze.com

PtolemAE

[Joe Geranio]

Thanks Ptolemae

[bpmurphy]

Somewhere on an old computer is an incomplete article I wrote in 2001 or early 2002 about these "Nektanebo" bronzes. There was also an email I sent to Eric McFadden outlining my arguments but I'm sure that doesn't exist anymore.

I will try to recap what I can remember.

Up until the late 90's these were very rare. In 1995 Weiser in his catalog of the Koln Collection of Ptolemaic bronzes cataloged one that he called unpublished. This was the first time that these were referred to a coins of Nektanebo and the attribution is based on the similarity of the scales on the bronze to the scales that appear on the gold staters that are attributed to Nektanebo. They aren't published in Svoronos, not in Copenhagen and not in any other Ptolemaic references. Whether they were not in these works because they were rare and the authors were unfamiliar with the coin, or because the authors didn't think they were Egyptian is not possible to determine, but I it was probably a mix of both depending on the author.  They weren't completely unpublished in 1995 though as there is an example published in Howgego's work on countermarks published in 1985, # 192, from the ANS collection with a countermark with the head of Athena. Howgego, following Newell, tentatively assigned the coin to Commagene.

After Weiser was published, Frank Kovacs sold a specimen to John Bergman. When John died CNG sold his collection and this coin is in their sale 57, lot 604. The coin was cataloged as the second known specimen and it sold for $1350. This was the first modern, public auction of an example of this coin, and is it normally happens, a high price tends to bring more specimens out of the woodwork. Pretty soon, the 3rd know, 4th known, 5th known specimen appeared.

After the CNG sale, which I cataloged if I recall correctly, I decided to see what I could discover about these coins. I wasn't convinced of the Nektanebo attribution and to me the ram side looked nearly identical to the rams on coins from Syria.  I do remember finding 2 or 3 other specimens in old catalogs, none of which were attributed to Egypt. At this point I don't remember which catalogs they were in or what the catalogers gave as an attribution. Sometime in the early 2000's I recall seeing a specimen in a small bag lot of bronzes, nearly all from Syrian or Mesopotamia.

This was about where my article ended. I did do some stylistic comparisons with rams from Syria and some comparative analysis of the Nektanebo gold staters, but I couldn't reproduce that now without a lot of work.

The conclusion I reached was that the coins were clearly Syrian. I was quite pleased when I discovered that Kevin Butcher came to the same conclusion. In 2004, Butcher, in his book Coinage in Roman Syria, suggests a Northern Syrian attribution (see pg. 405, #11). He illustrates a specimen from the BM which was acquired in 1947.

I used to write to dealers when they attributed and sold these coins as Nektanebo bronzes. Most just ignored me and most still sell them as Nektanebo. At this point I've given up trying to convince anyone otherwise and collectors still seem willing to pay good money for them. I sort of thought the Butcher reference would have ended the mis-attribution but evidently most people either aren't familiar with it or choose to ignore it. The Nektanebo attribution is more exciting I guess, otherwise it's just a dull Syrian bronze worth about $25.

They aren't anywhere near as rare as they used to be. I've seen at least 25-30 specimens. I had one consigned to me when I was running VAuctions but I refused to run it as a Nektanebo so the consigner wanted it back. There are 5 on VCoins right now.

Barry Murphy

[Lloyd Taylor]

Barry,

Thanks very much for the time and effort to give a comprehensive explanation of how the Nektanebo attribution came into being and the way it has survived despite the very weak basis on which it was originally made and the strong evidence that has since emerged pointing to a 1st century AD Syrian attribution.

For the life of me, I could not find any basis for the Nektanebo attribution in the literature and now I understand why.

I have recently seen Butcher's attribution to Syria referred to (in fact in may have been one of your attributions for CNG that was overturned - see further comment below), although I've yet to get hold of his book. It is interesting to hear that despite Butcher's work pointing to a completely different attribution that the numismatic trade persists with the one that has little, if not no basis in numismatic study. As you suggest the difference between a $25 Syrian bronze and a $2,000 piece of (fictional) Egyptian exotica probably colors the view of both sellers and many buyers.  When reality bites home, as it inevitably must, some purchasers will take a big value hit.  Even in recent months, I have noticed that the price of these AE's has slipped as more of them hit the market.

Your experience in cataloging the type is also an interesting study in vendor denial.  In the late last twelve or eighteen months,  I recall seeing one of the "Nektanebo" AE's cataloged at the open of a GNG electronic auction with the Syrian attribution. When I returned to the site a day or so later it had been completely reworked into the fictional Nektanebo attribution - someone didn't like your honesty on the subject?

All I can say that your explanation and experience proves that fiction sells. But for how long will it continue to do so for this specific coin type?

Thanks again for the comprehensive outline of what is behind the Nektanebo fiction.

Regards
Lloyd



P.S. For those unfamiliar with the coin type in discussion, an example is posted below:

[Joe Geranio]

Very good information.

Thanks for taking the time to explain.

[Andrew McCabe]

Back to the original question: why was coinage not introduced in Egypt (and Rome) at an early date, as it was in Greece? To properly understand this question requires an understanding of early money, which will not be found in numismatic texts. Some relevant books include:

Ancient History from coins, Christopher Howgego, London 1995 (also available as a Kindle version)
A very intelligent book addressing what we can learn about monetary policy from ancient coins – its chapters have quite conceptual headings: money, minting, empires, politics, circulation, crisis – consistent with the thematic nature of the book. Despite the title this book is mainly about economic policy and not about specific historical events.

The Monetary Systems of the Greeks and Romans, William Harris editor, 2008
The thirteen contributing authors to this 2005 conference were really on a mission to find non coinage forms of money, what we would today call Money Supply in its broader sense. Relevant chapters for the subject in question (why did some states introduce coinage, and others not) include:

• John Kroll, The Monetary Use of Weighed Bullion in Archaic Greece. Written records of money use in Greece regularly pre-date coinage, thus showing that weighed bullion acted as money before the invention of coinage.
  
• David Schaps. What was Money in Ancient Greece? Contra the remainder of the book, makes the case that money was essentially coin "I do not see a cowrie shell, nor a token of an embedded transaction, nor a transient marker in a vast system of credits and debits... after more than twenty years of looking at Greek money I still see a coin.
  
• Richard Seaford. Money and Tragedy. The Tyrants of Greece used the power given by early money to influence dramatic festivals that had traditionally been local, voluntary, communally funded by participant donations-in-kind, and uncoded. Money made Greek tragedy coded and transferable - the services of an actor or music player could be bought and relayed at a different festival in a different location.
  
• Edward Cohen. Elasticity of the Money Supply at Athens. Cites evidence of banking and bank credit at Athens. Athenian control over their large silver mines also gave them a reserve currency role, able to issue new money or withhold at will.
  
• J.G. Manning. Coinage as Code in Ptolemaic Egypt. The institutionalisation of coinage by the Ptolemies was an important lever of control in what was essentially a command economy.

Sitta von Reden, Money in Classical Antiquity, 2010
Addresses, among other topics, the monetisation of Egypt. "Pharaonic Egypt is a particularly good example of a society that had money without using coinage. Baskets of grain, vessels of oil, weighed bronze and foreign silver in total fulfilled most monetary functions ... some were used as measures of value, others as stores of wealth, and all of the, were in particular contexts accepted as means of payment. But none of these was used as all-purpose money throughout Egypt".

I cannot summarise three lengthy and relevant books in a short online posting, but two relevant facts need to be understood:
1. Money existed in Pharaonic Egypt. It just was not in the form of silver coinage.
2. The reasons that money was not in the form of silver coinage was because the particular social conditions of Pharaonic Egypt meant that coinage was just not needed. Peer-level transactions were at a village-community level and could easily be fulfilled by grain, oil etc. Hierarchical transactions, in a command economy, involved tax payments and distributions to/from government/religious authorities, and were best carried out in commodities. Coinage was simply not needed.

To move beyond speculation and guess-work, those interested in the subject should

1. Read up on the social and economic history of Pharaonic Egypt - only by understanding its history does its money usage make sense.

2. Read up on the subject of money in the ancient world. Other relevant references can be found at http://andrewmccabe.ancients.info/Mints.html#money

Andrew

[Joe Geranio]

Thanks Andrew for the book references.