More than 4000 years ago, Sargon the Great became king of Akkadia — and the leader of the world’s earliest recorded empire. Tablets from this period deal with trade transactions, loans and credit, but money, as we understand it, didn’t exist. There are no Sargon the Great coins. Instead, transactions were done using ‘commodity money’, which traded items of value like salt, shells or slaves.
It wasn’t until Persia’s conquest of Lydia, which had introduced coinage in the 6th-century BC, that coins came to dominate trade. In fact, much of Persia’s power came from their control of Lydian mints. However, Persia’s ruler, Cyrus the Great, didn’t put his own face on his coinage – depicting real people, rather than gods and goddesses, was taboo.
One of Cyrus’ successors, Darius I…
