ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at the phenomenon of coinage from a broad perspective, from Greece via the Near East to China, and use the comparison to tentatively distil some factors explaining the introduction of coinage. Even though a bimetallic system was created in Lydia, coins in the Greek world outside Asia Minor were made largely of silver, replacing the electrum coins almost completely by the end of the sixth century. In general the coinage of Alexander the Great and of the Seleucids followed the Attic standard. Alexander ushered in an important new stage in the history of money in the Ancient Near East. Only in the fifteenth century ad, after many centuries and monetary crises, China would follow the same route as the Near East and the Greek city-states and make silver also the unit of account, even though it remained unminted, like in the Near East before Alexander.
