many a loss, caused by the repeated disasters of a thousand years, the remnant fell at length into the hands of the victorious Turks. The time when gold was first coined is unknown. The oldest specimen in the Imperial Cabinet at Vienna is from Cyzicus, a town of Mysia, and bears the date of the seventh century before Christ; the next coin in point of antiquity is Persian, and was probably struck under the reign of Cyrus. According to Pliny, gold was first coined by the Romans in the year 547 after the foundation of the city. During the empire of the Chalifes Abuschafar-al-Monsur established a mint at Bagdad, in which silver coins (dirhems) and gold coins (dinars)[42] were struck. The Visigoths in Spain likewise had golden coins; but in the other western mediæval States they first appear, after a long interval, under Lewis the Pious, son of Charlemagne, in Venice, in 1290; and in Bohemia, under John of Luxembourg. The gold of the Carolingian monarch probably proceeded from the spoils of the old west Roman Empire; that of the Venetians (zecchins or ducats) was, no doubt, obtained, like that of the Phœnicians of old, by trading with the gold countries of Africa and of the distant East. The Florentines, the rivals of Venice, likewise obtained wealth by trade, and struck gold coins, which, from their being stamped with a flower, the arms of Florence, were called fiorini, or florins. Footnote 42: These names were borrowed from the Greek Drachma and the Latin Denarius. The coins of the kings of Bohemia were made from indigenous gold. It is hardly necessary to remark that since those times the use of gold coins has been constantly increasing with the progress of trade and civilisation; but even now, in many African and Asiatic countries which possess large quantities of gold, no coins are struck, but the metal is weighed, and thus serves as a medium of exchange, in the same manner as in the times of Abraham or Jacob. The countries from which the ancients obtained their chief supply of gold were the Indian Highlands, Colchis, and Africa. The seat of Ophir, which furnished this precious metal to the Phœnician and Jewish traders, is unknown. While some authorities place it on the east coast of Africa, others fix its situation somewhere on the west coast of the Indian peninsula; and Humboldt is even of opinion that the name had only a general signification, and that a voyage to Ophir meant no more than a commercial expedition to any of the coasts or isles of the Indian Ocean, just as at present we speak of a voyage to the Levant or the West Indies. The golden sands over which the Pactolus, a small river of Lydia, rolled, gave rise, it has been said, to the wealth of Crœsus.