Much of the evidence for this use takes us back well into the second millennium. Some of the localities where it is known to have prevailed earliest were connected with Lydia at this time. Egypt was the ally of Gyges, the Hittites were the predecessors of the Lydians in the land of Lydia. Troy probably formed part of Gyges’ dominions[778]. The book of Genesis specifically associates ring money with caravans[779]. It is therefore probable that rings circulated in Lydia itself until they were supplanted by the new stamped coins, which may have owed their shape to its convenience for stamping. [Sidenote: With Gyges’ ring cp. perhaps Pheidon’s spits, the Attic obol and drachma, and the Roman as.] In Argos, according to a tradition which is defended in the next chapter, the stamped coinage was preceded by a currency of metal spits (below, fig. 21): if the tradition is to be trusted, these spits remained permanently associated with the name of the tyrant who displaced them by coined money. Have we a parallel in the case of the Gyges story? Is its hero the inventor of the new stamped coinage and has his name become associated with the rings that he displaced? It is perfectly possible that the new coins were at first regarded as so many rings’ worth of precious metal. The name νόμισμα implies that the stamped coin had won general acceptance; it would of course be quite appropriate to a currency in rings or kettles or cows; but there is no evidence of its use previous to the introduction of a stamped metal coinage, and it was probably the general acceptance of this latter that gave rise to the word. To call the earliest Lydian coins rings (δακτύλιοι) would be precisely like calling the earliest coins of Athens spits (ὀβελοί) or bundles of spits (δραχμαί) or the earliest coins of Rome bars (asses). If obol and drachma and as survived while δακτύλιος did not, the fact is sufficiently accounted for by the histories of Athens, Rome, and Lydia. [Sidenote: But if so, why is the ring a seal ring?] The explanation just offered of the ring of Gyges omits one detail that is essential to the story as told by Plato. Plato’s ring is a signet ring, and it is the seal (σφραγίς) that does the magic. Babelon holds that the seal makers (δακτυλιογλύφοι) of the period were probably also the coin strikers. But if we are to follow one of our own leading numismatists, G. Macdonald, the connexion between seal and coin was closer than this. Originally, according to him[780], coins were simply pieces of sealed metal. [Sidenote: “Coins are pieces of sealed metal.”] The minting of money in its most primitive form was simply the placing of a seal on lumps of electrum that had previously been weighed and adjusted to a fixed standard: the excessive rarity of coins that have only a striated surface on the obverse proves that this primitive stage was of short duration[781].