each that which fell in with her tastes or seemed likely to be most
helpful to her in her commercial relations. As the country produced
gold in considerable quantities, and received still more from extraneous
sources, the precious metal came soon to be employed as a means of
exchange under other conditions than those which had hitherto prevailed.
Besides acting as commission agents and middle-men for the disposal
of merchandise at Sardes, Ephesus, Miletus, Clazomenaa, and all the
maritime cities, the Lydians performed at the same time the functions
of pawnbrokers, money-changers, and bankers, and they were ready to
make loans to private individuals as well as to kings. Obliged by the
exigencies of their trade to cut up the large gold ingots into sections
sufficiently small to represent the smallest values required in daily
life, they did not at first impress upon these portions any stamp as
a guarantee of the exact weight or the purity of the metal; they were
estimated like the _tabonu_ of the Egyptians, by actual weighing on the
occasion of each business transaction.

[Illustration: 055.jpg LYDIAN COINS WITH A LION AND LION'S HEAD]

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

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