The history of coins stretches back to the first millennium BC/BCE. Notable early examples of coins include the Lydian lion coins, Persian daric and siglos, Tong Bei, the dirham and gold dinar.
Coins are a major archaeological source of history. Coins convey information about language, administration, religion, economic conditions, and the ruler who minted those coins.
Coins were first made of scraps of metal by hitting a hammer positioned over an anvil. The Chinese produced primarily cast coinage, and this spread to South-East Asia and Japan. Although few non-Chinese cast coins were produced by governments, it was a common practice amongst counterfeiters.
The Matsya Purana (IAST: Matsya Puraņa) is one of the eighteen major Puranas (Mahapurana), and among the oldest and better preserved in the Puranic genre of Sanskrit literature in Hinduism. The text is a Vaishnavism text named after the half-human and half-fish avatar of Vishnu. However, the text has been called by the 19th-century Sanskrit scholar Horace Hayman Wilson, ""although a Shaivism (Shiva-related) work, it is not exclusively so""; the text has also been referred to one that simultaneously praises various Hindu gods and goddesses.
Is the course of the last fifty years the science of Greek coins, ancient numismatics, has undergone great developments. Up to about 1860 the study had been gradually taking shape, and many able scholars and numismatists, such as Sestini, Eckhel, and later Millingen and others, had opened up great fields of study, and showed much penetra-tion and erudition in the discussion of the various classes of coins and their relations to the cities which issued them. Yet these writers had scarcely founded a science of ancient numismatics. Methods had still to be sought out and estab-lished. The pioneers of numismatic method wero Mommsen, in the opening chapters of his Geschichte des römischen Münzwesens (1865), and Brandis, in his Münz-, Muss- und Gewichtswesen in Vorderusien (1866). These writers clearly saw that for the formation of numismatics as a branch of historical science two points were fundamental. First, it was necessary to determine not only the cities which struck each group of coins, but also the date and occasion of each issue. And secondly, as coins were measures of value and a medium of exchange, the one most important fact in regard to them was the quantity of precious metal which each contained; in fact their weight. Eckhel in his great Doctrina Numorum Veterum (1792-8), which is still valuable as a storehouse of learning and a model of good sense, had but a very vague notion of the dates of coins; and their weights had not been seriously considered. The works of Brandis and Mommsen were epoch-making; but they could not carry very far, because the essential point of the dates of issues had not been satisfactorily gone into.
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