(1) _Who Invented Coinage?_--The oldest coins yet found were made by the Lydians, and on this account it is usually said that the Lydians were the first to coin money. The date of these coins is uncertain. They bear the name of no king, but are usually assigned to the seventh century B. C. Mr. Head, of the British Museum, dated them tentatively at 700 B. C. They probably were made under the Lydian dynasty founded by Gyges in 697 B. C., the last king of which, the famous Crœsus, was overthrown by Cyrus the Great, in 546 B. C. It is improbable that these coins were invented earlier than the reign of Gyges, and they may not have been put into circulation until he had been some years on the throne. It is recognized that the weight of these coins conforms to a Babylonian standard. There seems to be evidence that coined money was employed by the Assyrians in the reign of Esarhaddon. None of the coins have been found, but a series of loans and payments, dated in the years 676-671 B. C., designate the amounts of money in “shekels of silver-heads of Ishtar.”[192] As has been noted by Menant and Johns, this can hardly mean anything else than silver made into coins of the value of a shekel and stamped with the head of Ishtar. As Gyges was a contemporary of Esarhaddon, it seems probable that Lydia borrowed the idea of coinage from the Mesopotamian Valley. Be this as it may, the coinage of money was a great step forward. To have the value of a piece of metal determined beforehand and guaranteed by an official stamp greatly facilitated the transaction of business. It eliminated the delays incident to weighing the metal, and the disputes that were sure to ensue as to the correctness of the weights which were put into the balances. (2) _Darics._--The invention of coined money first affected Palestine during the Persian period. Darius I of Persia, 521-486 B. C., organized the coinage of that realm. The gold coins issued by him were of the weight of a Babylonian shekel. They weighed from 125 to 130 grains Troy. One in the British Museum weighs 129 grains. They bore on the face a picture of Darius with a bow to the left; (see Fig. 189). Because of this picture they were called “darics,” just as the French 20-franc piece is called a “napoleon.” The daric is mentioned in several Biblical books that were written after the beginning of the Persian period. (See 1 Chron. 29:7; Ezra 2:69; 8:27; Neh. 7:70-72.) It is wrongly translated “dram” in the Authorized Version. After the Persian period the coinage of all the nations to whom the Jews became subject circulated in turn in Palestine. Foreign coins also found their way into the country. Many of these ultimately were lost and buried in the soil, so that many, many coins have been brought to light by archæological research. We have space here to mention only those that are of the greatest interest to students of the Bible.