The idea at length occurred to them to impress each of these pieces with a common stamp, serving, like the trade-marks employed by certain guilds of artisans, to testify at once to their genuineness and their exact weight:  in a word, they were the inventors of money.  The most ancient coinage of their mint was like a flattened sphere, more or less ovoid, in form:  it consisted at first of electrum, and afterwards of smelted gold, upon which parallel striae or shallow creases were made by a hammer.  There were two kinds of coinage, differing considerably from each other; one consisted of the heavy stater, weighing about 14.20 grammes, perhaps of Phoenician origin, the other of the light stater, of some 10.80 grammes in weight, which doubtless served as money for the local needs of Lydia:  both forms were subdivided into pieces representing respectively the third, the sixth, the twelfth, and the twenty-fourth of the value of the original.

[Illustration:  056a.jpg COIN BEARING HEAD OF MOUFLON GOAT]

     Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from a coin in the Cabinet des
     Medailles.

[Illustration:  056b.jpg MONEY OF CROESUS]

The stamp which came to be impressed upon the money was in relief, and varied with the banker; * when political communities began to follow the example of individuals, it also bore the name of the city where it was minted.

     * [The best English numismatists do not agree with M.
     Babelon’s “banker” theory.  Cf.  Barclay V. Head, Historia
     Nummorum, p. xxxiv.—–­Tr.]

The type of impression once selected, was little modified for fear of exciting mistrust among the people, but it was more finely executed and enlarged so as to cover one of the faces, that which we now call the obverse.  Several subjects entered into the composition of the design, each being impressed by a special punch:  thus in the central concavity we find the figure of a running fox, emblem of Apollo Bassareus, and in two similar depressions, one above and the other below the central, appear a horse’s or stag’s head, and a flower with four petals.  Later on the design was simplified, and contained only one, or at most two figures—­a hare squatting under a tortuous climbing plant, a roaring lion crouching with its head turned to the left, the grinning muzzle of a lion, the horned profile of an antelope or mouflon sheep:  rosettes and flowers, included within a square depression, were then used to replace the stria and irregular lines of the reverse.  These first efforts were without inscriptions; it was not long, however, before there came to be used, in addition to the figures, legends, from which we sometimes learn the name of the banker; we read, for instance, “I am the mark of Phannes,” on a stater of electrum struck at Ephesus, with a stag grazing on the right.  We are ignorant as to which of the Lydian kings first made use of the new invention, and so threw into circulation the gold and electrum which filled his treasury to overflowing.  The ancients say it was Gyges, but the Gygads of their time cannot be ascribed to him; they were, without any doubt, simply ingots marked with the stamp of the banker of the time, and were attributed to Gyges either out of pure imagination or by mistake.*