transaction.

[Illustration: 055.jpg LYDIAN COINS WITH A LION AND LION'S HEAD]

Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from a coin in the Cabinet des
Medailles.

The idea at length occurred to them to impress each of these pieces with
a common stamp, serving, like the trade-marks employed by certain guilds
of artisans, to testify at once to their genuineness and their exact
weight: in a word, they were the inventors of money. The most ancient
coinage of their mint was like a flattened sphere, more or less ovoid,
in form: it consisted at first of electrum, and afterwards of smelted
gold, upon which parallel striae or shallow creases were made by a
hammer. There were two kinds of coinage, differing considerably from
each other; one consisted of the heavy stater, weighing about 14.20
grammes, perhaps of Phoenician origin, the other of the light stater, of
some 10.80 grammes in weight, which doubtless served as money for
the local needs of Lydia: both forms were subdivided into pieces
representing respectively the third, the sixth, the twelfth, and the
twenty-fourth of the value of the original.

[Illustration: 056a.jpg COIN BEARING HEAD OF MOUFLON GOAT]

Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from a coin in the Cabinet des
Medailles.

[Illustration: 056b.jpg MONEY OF CROESUS]

The stamp which came to be impressed upon the money was in relief, and
varied with the banker; * when political communities began to follow the
example of individuals, it also bore the name of the city where it was
minted.

* [The best English numismatists do not agree with M.
Babelon's "banker" theory. Cf. Barclay V. Head, _Historia
Nummorum_, p. xxxiv.---Tr.]

The type of impression once selected, was little modified for fear of
exciting mistrust among the people, but it was more finely executed and
enlarged so as to cover one of the faces, that which we now call the
_obverse_. Several subjects entered into the composition of the design,
each being impressed by a special punch: thus in the central concavity
we find the figure of a running fox, emblem of Apollo Bassareus, and
in two similar depressions, one above and the other below the central,
appear a horse's or stag's head, and a flower with four petals. Later
on the design was simplified, and contained only one, or at most two
figures--a hare squatting under a tortuous climbing plant, a roaring
lion crouching with its head turned to the left, the grinning muzzle of
a lion, the