So Croesus's gold coins really have changed the world. All these possibilities are in this little object." Since even a few years ago, it's raised the standards of living. But it's allowed the population of the world to expand beyond limits that were thought possible. Over that period, money has worked pretty well and has played a very important role in the triumphs of humanity - and also of course in its miseries. It's just a historical process, quite a complicated one, that's built up over time. "There is nothing either natural or God-given about the use of money. But what makes this inequality of fortune possible is having money. And in the way that human beings are, they tend to become fascinated by the potential of objects, and certainly it's a feature of the present day that people accumulate fortunes that nobody could possibly spend, and yet people still compete to accumulate ever larger fortunes.
"In modern times, what money does is it incorporates a wish, and displays that wish to the world. "There is a continuity between this coin of Croesus and today, and when you look at it, it has concealed in it the entire future, including the bonuses at Goldman Sachs and the career of Sir Fred Goodwin. These coins were minted under Croesus around 550 BC but, in a very real sense, they are already part of our modern world, as the financial journalist and novelist, James Buchan explains: The largest one we've got here - it's in my hand now - is a kind of figure-of-eight shape, an oblong, slightly squeezed in the middle, and on it are a lion and a bull facing each other as if in combat, and about to crash together head-on. The Lydian coins are not all the same shape. They come in all different sizes, from about the shape of a modern one penny piece right down to something the size of a lentil. I have here some of the original gold coins that made Croesus so rich.
In China they began using miniature spades and knives in very much the same way that we would now use coins, and virtually simultaneously in the Mediterranean world, the Lydians started making actual coins as we would recognise them today - round shapes in precious metals. The Egyptians, for example, used a sophisticated system that measured value against standard weights of copper and gold, but as new states and new ways of organising trade emerged, coinage began to make an appearance, and fascinatingly, it happened independently in two different parts of the world at almost the same time. For over two thousand years, states ran complex economies and international trading networks without a coin to hand. We've all grown so accustomed to using little round pieces of metal to buy things, that it's easy to forget that coins arrived quite late in the history of the world. But in this programme, I want to look at a different kind of new power - or more precisely, I want to look at the creation of a new type of object that would ultimately become a power in its own right: coinage. His kingdom, Lydia, was among the new powers that emerged across the Middle East about three thousand years ago, so it was part of that wider political upheaval that I've been exploring this week. "The stamps on them are the guarantee of the weight and the purity." (Paul Craddock)Ĭroesus was a king in what's now western Turkey. "I imagined it was flatter and more circular, but this is convex, with a design only on one side." (James Buchan)
We don't know who first coined the phrase "as rich as Croesus", but it's now embedded not just in our language but in many others, and we're going to be looking at some of the world's first proper coins in this programme. The real King Croesus was indeed fabulously rich and, until a horrible twist at the end of his life, he did have a wonderful time with his money. After so many centuries, Croesus is still the world-wide symbol of the man who's made it. It's a promise that's been made countless times through the centuries, despite financial booms and busts, but what intrigues me most about finding it on this hyper-modern website is that the name of Croesus still stands for the ultimate in wealth. Start with fifty bucks, it says, and very soon, you'll become "rich like Croesus". "Get Rich Quick!" trumpets the promo on a buzzy financial website. Gold coin of Croesus, King of Lydia (made around 550 BC) minted in Turkey
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