Ute Wartenberg, American Numismatic Society
In this paper, I examine the difficult issue of the significance and meaning of the massive number of designs on the earliest coins. The corpus of images on early electrum coinage is famously obtuse. Some of the emblems appear to follow the rules of later ancient coin iconography, where images are closely associated with the authority that issues the coin: Athena and the owl belong to Athens, the turtle to Aegina, and so on. These emblems for cities (“parasema”) are also employed on other material (seals, inscriptions, amphorae, etc.) on a regular basis from the 5th century onwards. In the corpus of early coinage, similar examples exist in the form of the lion head, which is interpreted as the emblem of the Lydian kings. For the coinage of Miletus, the lion with reverted head is a well-known badge for the city. However, many of the other hundreds of designs on early coinage of the 6th century BCE defy any straightforward attributions, and the sheer number has led to various interpretations and speculation about the individuals, public and private, who might have produced them.
Research on early electrum coinage has experienced a revival in recent years and, in particular, die-studies of some series are beginning to alter our understanding of various technical aspects of early coinage in significant ways.
Specifically, the use of “geometric” patterns and the habit of depicting only partial, often unrecognizable, parts of animals or humans displays an iconographic trend otherwise rare on coins and gems of the Archaic period. The use of such “abstract” images (if this is what they are) begs the question why they were chosen for early coins and how they were understood. What does a simple set of lines or a square signify as a monetary image? How does such an image connect with a concept of value? As later coinage of the Mediterranean seems, almost routinely, to follow the rules of an iconographic program for coinage, one also wonders what process (political or cultural) governs the choice of images in the early years of coinage production and use. Similar designs found on archaic gems might have influenced early coinage, which should be examined in the light of a more complete corpus of electrum coinage now available. It is important to try to understand how after a century of seemingly endless numismatic images a more defined set of motifs (such as a god or mythical creature, a plant, an animal, or later a head of a ruler) became the norm, one which still governs coinage today.