Gold Coin of Croesus

A History of the World in 100 Objects

BBC

History

4.4 • 2.1K Ratings

🗓️ 19 February 2010

⏱️ 14 minutes

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Summary

The history of the world as told through one hundred objects from the British Museum. This week Neil MacGregor, the Museum's Director, has been looking at the collapse of old regimes and the emergence of new powers from the Middle East to China. In today's programme, he describes how a powerful new state finds a dramatic way to help run its increasingly complex economy and trading networks - using coins. Croesus was a king in what is now Western Turkey and his kingdom was called Lydia. It's remarkable that over two thousand years later we still have an expression that celebrates his wealth. Neil MacGregor considers how money, in the form of coins, first came about and describes the (hugely complex) methods of creating them. And whatever happened to Croesus?

Transcript

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0:00.0	Thank you for downloading this episode of a history of the world in a hundred objects from BBC Radio 4.
0:10.0	Get Rich Quick, Trumpets the promo on a buzzy financial website.
0:19.0	Start with 50 bucks, it says, and very soon you will become rich like creasis.
0:24.0	It's a promise that's
0:32.0	it's a promise that's been made countless times through the centuries, despite
0:36.8	financial booms and busts. But what intrigues me most about finding it on this
0:42.1	hyper-modern website is that the name of
0:45.1	Creasus still stands for the ultimate in wealth. After so many centuries
0:50.4	Creasus is still the worldwide symbol of the man who's made it.
0:57.4	The real King Cressus was indeed fabulously rich, and until a horrible twist at the end of his life he did have a wonderful time with
1:05.6	his money. We don't know who first coined the phrase as rich as crees, but it's now embedded
1:12.2	not just in our language but in many others.
1:14.4	And we're going to be looking at some of the world's first proper coins
1:18.3	in this program.
1:19.3	I imagined it was flat and more circular, but this is sort of convex with a design only on one side.
1:30.0	The stamps on them are the guarantee of the weight and the purity.
1:36.7	A history of the world in a hundred objects. Gold coins of creesus, king of Lydia, around 550 BC.
2:12.0	Chrisus was a king in what's now Western Turkey. His kingdom, Lydia, was among the new powers that emerged
2:16.3	across the Middle East about 3,000 years ago. So it was part of that wider political upheaval
2:21.7	that I've been exploring this week. But in this
2:24.4	program I want to look at a different kind of new power or more precisely I want to
2:30.1	look at the creation of a new type of object that would ultimately become a power in its own right,
	...

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