Turkey is the home of the first coins. More or less. Similar claims are made for China. There was writing in both places at the time that the coins emerged, but not much of that writing has come to us, and what was written about was not necessarily relevant to the establishment of historical facts about the usage of what we call “coins.”
And then there is also the obvious inference that those things that we now call “coins,” were preceded by metallic commodities, in convenient sizes and shapes, that were traded by weight. We have examples of those commodities in both Turkey and China, and we argue about whether they were, in some way, coins.
Turkey today is a little bit, relatively speaking, of European territory, and a much…
