The queen on my money: Propaganda in my pocket

Similar to stamps' nation-building utility, coins and banknotes also avail to their issuers semiotic storytelling value often used to promote a national identity.

Disclaimer: Don’t worry—not every edition of Power & Philately will have a disclaimer. But after talking with a reader about the first edition, I feel the urge to warn you about what’s to come in the newsletter below: I mostly discuss coins (and oddly enough, shells) as I continue to set the stage and develop a style that works for Power & Philately. Besides, this kind of slow burn lends well to training your attention span, so trust the process, and find solace in my promise that so many stamps will soon be coming your way, you might as well call me the Inter-Governmental Philatelic Corporation.

Since at least 650 BC, coin issuers have used coinage to facilitate trade and commerce while communicating a national identity. The obverses of Canadian circulation coins (shown) depict the reigning monarch at the time of issue, and the reverses feature various national symbols, including the maple leaf, beaver, Bluenose schooner, caribou, coat of arms, loon and polar bear. Photo by 'KMR Photography' via CC by 2.0.

Government officials have long used stamps and coins as loudspeakers for their nation-building narratives.

Let’s first look at the more familiar object – coins – before exploring the now-obscure postage stamp in the next edition of Power & Philately.

In seeking objects to facilitate payments, pre-coinage moneyers typically settled on distinguishable, durable, portable and easily accessible objects; however, those early economic artifacts lacked the ability to tell national, regional or even local stories.

One of the most popular types of pre-coinage money, the cowrie shell simply came from the sea. With several recorded varieties, the smooth and shiny shells stood among the longest-tenured forms of currency: their use spanned large parts of the world, including Asia and Africa, across much of the past 4,000 years.¹ Rather than formal legislation and institutions (such as the Bank of Canada Act and the Bank of Canada), systems of social customs regulated this and other early money. Researchers have found shells pulled from nearby coastlines would hold less value than similar shells from distant seas, where risk-averse people would imperil life and limb to find a particularly dashing specimen.²

For millennia, people harvested and used cowrie shells to trade for goods and services. Made of calcium carbonate, the shells – once used as shelter for sea snails – facilitated the early economies in Africa, Asia, Europe and Oceania.

Among Indigenous communities in present-day Canada, the shells had ceremonial uses, including for wampum, which – aside from its cultural significance – also served as an early form of currency along with beaver pelts.³

Each of these objects proved useful as a medium of exchange, but their cultural significance superseded their economic utility. By the mid-19th century, most of the world moved on to coins, tokens and paper money, all of which offered customizable storytelling features lacked by earlier currencies.

THE FIRST COIN

The world’s first official coins, believed to originate about 2,800 years ago in 630-620 BC, allowed their creators to tell a story and share it far and wide.

Issued during the reign of Sadyattes in present-day Turkey, the earliest variety of Lydian coinage met “all of the requirements laid out in the dictionary definition,” according to numismatist Russell Augustin, the president and CEO of AU Capital Management.⁴ (Technically, a coin refers to a form of currency issued by a government and assigned a denomination for use in trade and commerce.)

According to the sixth-century Greek poet Xenophanes, as quoted by the contemporary historian Herodotus, the kingdom of Lydia, neighbouring Greece, became "the first to strike and use coins of gold and silver."⁵ Herodotus lauded the Lydians as the world's first merchants, who served as the gatekeepers between the ancient eastern and western worlds.

The coin’s obverse featured the Lydian symbol of royalty, the lion,⁶ stamped onto it as an official seal.

The world’s first coin, struck in Lydia (present-day Turkey) circa 630-620 BC, features a nation-building design in the form of a Lydian lion (left). Photo by Colosseo Collection (colosseocollection.com).

“Earlier coins like the striated and geometric types failed to clearly meet the final criteria, whereas the lion was consistently associated with Lydia,” Augustin added.

Like their pre-coinage counterparts, Lydian coins had an economic function – to facilitate trade – but they also provided a medium in which people in power could reliably influence public opinion.

“Standardized lumps of metal were exactly what the city-states needed to build their new king of society – a society too big to run on familial reciprocity but too egalitarian to run on tribute – and soon there were a hundred different mints spread across Greece making silver coins,” U.S. journalist Jacob Goldstein wrote in his 2020 book Money: The True Story of a Made-Up Thing.

(Technologically limited and perhaps not fully hip to the storytelling power of the coin, the reverse only shows an incuse punch, created during the minting process by a hammer forcing a blank planchet into an anvil die. Soon enough, ancient moneyers realized the design stamped onto one side of a coin could be augmented with an additional design on the other side, effectively doubling their communicative power.)

The lion also demonstrated the value of the coin’s contents, which included electrum, a naturally occurring alloy of gold, silver and a small percentage of copper (initially known by the Greeks as "white gold"). By stamping a chunk of precious metal with the Lydian lion, the moneyers bestowed upon it an official status while indicating the government’s willingness to accept it as currency—a first for the world of money.

This novel concept set the stage for banknotes, stamps and other official documents to tell a national story in addition to their practical uses.

In the next edition of Power & Philately, we’ll (finally) take a look at stamps, a more recent invention but one no less effective in influencing public opinion.

1. According to Ingrid Van Damme, of the Museum of the National Bank of Belgium, cowrie shells not only served as a means of payment, but their possession represented a “tangible sign of prosperity and power” until the 20th century in some parts of the world.

2. A 2020 study in the Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory found people in coastal communities often collected and used cowrie shells, but “evidence of their distribution indicates that they were also exchanged over long distances, facilitating their circulation and use in far-flung regions of the globe.”

3. “Early Europeans viewed wampum as a type of money,” retired senior central banker James Powell wrote in his 2005 book, A History of the Canadian Dollar, published by the Bank of Canada. “Wampum became an essential part of the fur trade as European settlers used shell beads to buy beaver pelts from the Iroquois and other inland peoples. Wampum had all the hallmarks of a useful currency. There was strong demand for it among the Native peoples, beads were difficult to make, and they were conveniently sized.”

4. Augustin was writing about the Colosseo Collection, a private collection spanning the first millennium of ancient coins.

5. “King Croesus of Lydia 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,” according to the Encyclopedia Britannica.

6. “The head of a lion was the symbol of the Lydian royal house,” according to Florin Curta, a professor of medieval history and archaeology at the University of Florida.