Early developments, c. 650�490 . The 6th-century Greek poet Xenophanes, quoted by the historian Herodotus,.... silver gold

) produced a bimetallic system of pure gold and pure silver coins, but the foundation deposit of the Artemisium (temple to Artemis) at Ephesus shows that electrum coins were in production before Croesus, possibly under King Gyges. with its pegasi (from their constant obverse type of a pegasus) was coining silver from c. 575 with a light drachma of about three grams, and it is reasonably certain that in Athens, in the first half of the 6th century, Attic coins, based on a drachma of about 4.25 grams derived from Euboea and with a variety of obverse types, including an owl (the reverses, like those of the Corinthian pegasi, were impressed with a die design), were supplanting the earlier coinage of Aegina. These early silver coins, while much less valuable intrinsically than the electrum and gold coins of Asia Minor, nevertheless possessed considerable purchasing power: the Aeginetan and Attic-Euboic didrachms and the Corinthian tridrachm were high denominations suitable for ma! jor commerce and not for everyday life. From the Persian Empire, with its vast gold and silver coinage, successor to that of Croesus, to Magna Graecia and Sicily, and from the Dorian colony of Cyrene to the Greek or semi-Greek cities of Thrace, there was a network of varied and competitive currencies, generally of fine quality and steady weight. In certain cities of Italy and Sicily, however, including Tarentum and Metapontum, a different technique was popular, the obverse type in relief being repeated intaglio on the reverse, very probably with the object of concealing the older types of coins imported for restriking. Human or anthropomorphic figures, however, were comparatively rare on early Greek coins, though the famous gold darics, a name derived from Darius I, and silver shekels of Persia showed the great king in an attitude of attack. Much more popular was the representation of idealized heads of deities, which, once established for the two Athenas, Parthenos and Cha! linitis, at Athens and Corinth, quickly became the vogue elsew! here, encouraged by the development of double-relief coinage ( i.e., coinage with obverse and reverse in relief), which allowed the head of a civic deity to be paired on the other side by the city's symbol. silver gold