Herodotus 6, as rich as Cresus

Hello, this is Bertie. You may have heard the myth of Midas, he of the golden touch.

Naturally, we have that story on Story- StoryNori. Everything he touched turned to gold.

Including his own daughter. Eventually he washed away the curse of his wealth in the river Pactolus.

The Midas touch is a myth, of course, and its moral shows how greed for wealth can destroy what

is truly valuable in your life. But there really was a King Midas in history. In fact, there were three of them,

fathers and sons, and they were kings of the land of Frigia, in what is now Eastern Turkey.

They probably did not have the golden touch, but it is true that the rivers in that part of

the world were rich in gold.

At the time of our story, Frigia had been taken over by its bigger neighbour Lydia,

and was part of the great Lydian Empire.

Lydia now owned the rivers that contained the famous gold.

The Lydians became incredibly rich,

but it was not just the gold that made them wealthy, it was what they did with it. The Lydians invented the idea of money. The kings of Lidia were among the first people to mint gold and

silver coins.

Interestingly, the same idea came about in China around that time.

The government purified the gold by melting it at very high temperatures.

Took out all the other metals such as silver

and formed the gold into coins with fixed and known weights.

To prove that these were government coins, they put their stamps on them.

In the case of the Lydians, this was often the face of a lion.

Money made trade very efficient because people knew and trusted the value of the coins.

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