In a world where market forces dominate life it is hard to imagine trade without coinage. Yet this invention of the ancient Lydians was not initially used by Mediterranean states for trade but as a guaranteed weight of metal (usually gold or silver) to pay people for official duties.
Third century BC barbarian Europe also took on the idea, similarly producing high denomination coinage. Usually based on the gold coins of Alexander the Great or his father Philip II of Macedon, these coins often changed hands as payment or gifts between a Celtic king and his client aristocrats.
Only in the 1st century BC, under the influence of the mercantile nations of the Mediterranean, did small denomination coins appear, for use in market buying and selling. These smaller coins were made of bronze, potin (an alloy of silver and base metal) or very small amounts of silver.
Moulds for their manufacture have been found in oppida (fortified towns): their distribution suggests that individual nobles minted their own coins using the design appropriate to their local king.
Some literacy among the upper classes is implied by the inscriptions upon these coins, which in Britain give an interesting insight into local politics. The coins of the pro-Roman Atrebates bear the legend 'Rex' (the Latin word for king) along with their king's name, whereas their rivals, the Catuvellauni, use the native Celtic title 'Ricon' on their coinage.
Early Celtic coins show a progressive 'Chinese whispers' type disintegration of the designs on their Macedonian prototypes, which originally bore the king's head on the obverse and a horse-drawn chariot with charioteer on the reverse - some of the most distant Celtic versions were reduced to a mass of meaningless dots and swirls.
