Page:Origin of metallic currency and weight standards.djvu/333

 and was the chief Greek emporium in this region. There are bronze coins of this city made in the shape of fishes, and

inscribed, which has been identified as the abbreviation [Greek: thunnos], tunny. Others are inscribed [Greek: ARICHO], which Koehler read as [Greek: tarichos], salt fish, but which the distinguished German numismatist Von Sallet regards as meaning a basket [Greek: arrichos]. He holds those marked as the legal price of a tunny fish, those marked [Greek: ARICHO] as that of a basket of fish. When we recall the Chinese bronze cowries, the Burmese silver shells, the silver fish-hooks of the Indian Ocean, the little hoes and knives of China, and the miniature axes from Africa, we are constrained to believe that in those coins of Olbia, shaped like a fish, we have a distinct proof of the influence on the Greek mind of the same principle which has impelled other peoples to imitate in metal the older object of barter which a metal currency is replacing. The inhabitants of Olbia were largely intermixed with the surrounding barbarians, and may therefore have felt some difficulty in replacing their barter unit by a round piece of metal bearing merely the imprint of a fish, while the pure-blooded Greek of Cyzicus had no hesitation in mentally bridging the gulf between a real fish and a piece of metal merely stamped with a fish, and did not require the intermediate step of first shaping his metal unit into the form of a tunny. We shall find that this tendency to shape metal into the form of the object which it supplants may perhaps be traced in the coins of Aegina and Boeotia.

Coins of Olbia in the form of tunny fish.

In the same quarter of Hellas we find another instance of a coin type which may be regarded as evidence that the silver coin which bears it was the representative of an older barter