ABSTRACT
The use of coins is no more than an improvement upon exchange based upon the transfer of metals by weight, the system common in the East for some thousands of years before the peoples of the Ægean began to make coins. When they began to strike money they naturally used the metal already circulating as a means of payment. When states took over the business of minting they adopted the same course, confirming the choice of a medium of exchange already made by the community at large, and crystallized in contemporary commercial customs. Such decisions gave the seal of state approbation to the system, and probably had the effect of making it more universally applicable and enforceable than it had previously been. 1
