Evolution in Art: As Illustrated by the Life-histories of Designs

by Alfred C. Haddon

The tunny fish continually passes in vast shoals through the sea of Marmora from the Black Sea to the Mediterranean. A representation of this fish appears invariably on the electrum coins of Cyzicus. “We know that the articles which form the staple commodities of a community in the age of barter virtually form its money. In a city like Cyzicus, whose citizens depended for their wealth on their fisheries and trade, rather than on flocks and herds and agriculture, the tunny fish singly or in certain defined numbers, as by the score or hundred and the like, would naturally form a chief monetary unit, just as the stock-fish (dried cod) were employed in mediæval Iceland. Are we not then justified in considering the tunny fish, which forms the invariable adjunct of the coins of Cyzicus, as an indication that these coins superseded a primitive system in which the tunny formed a monetary unit, just as the kettle and pot countermarks on the coins of Crete point back to the days when real kettles formed the chief medium of exchange?

“But far stronger evidence is at hand to show that the tunny fish was used as a monetary unit in some parts of Hellas. The city of Olbia, which lay on the north shore of the Black Sea, was a Milesian colony, and was the chief Greek emporium in this region. There are bronze coins of this city made in the shape of fishes and inscribed ΘΥ, which has been identified as the abbreviation of θύννος, tunny. When we recall the Chinese bronze cowries, the Burmese silver shells, the silver fish-hooks of the Indian Ocean, etc., 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.

The island of Tenedos, lying off the Troad, struck at a very early date silver coins bearing for device a double-headed axe. Pausanias, in the second century A.D., saw at Delphi axes dedicated by Periclytus of Tenedos. It is probable, according to Professor Ridgeway, that such double axes as those stamped on the coins of Tenedos formed part of the earliest Greek system of currency. The prizes offered in the funeral games of Patroclus are of course merely the usual objects of barter and currency, slavewomen, oxen, tripods, talents of gold, and the like. “But he (Achilles) set for the archers dark iron, and he set down ten axes and ten half-axes;”[139] that is, ten double and ten single-headed axes. That such axes were evidently an important article in Tenedos is proved by the dedication at Delphi, and may not the axe on their coins represent the local unit of an earlier epoch?

The “tortoise” on the coins of Aegina has been mythologised as an emblem of Aphrodite, but the connection is not very intimate. According to a fragment of Ephorus, the Aeginetans took to commerce on account of the barrenness of their island. But they must have had something to give in exchange to the people before they could have developed a carrying trade, and Professor Ridgeway suggests that the tortoise on the coins of Aegina simply indicates that the old monetary unit of that island was the shell of the turtle (“tortoise-shell”), which was considerably larger, and therefore more valuable for making bowls than that of the land or mountain tortoise. The earliest coins represent a turtle, for the feet are flippers quite distinct from the legs of the later tortoises; also the thirteen plates of the dorsal shield, or carapace, are not so distinct in the turtle as in the tortoise, and in the older coins these plates are not represented. The earliest coins, too, have the incuse on the reverse divided into eight triangular compartments, which may indicate the eight plates of the ventral shield, or plastron, of all these animals.

The same line of argument applies to the Bœotian shield, which has been confidently pronounced to be a sacred emblem, but which we must now regard as a numismatic symbol of a real shield. On the reverse of these coins the incuse forms a rude X, bounded by a circle of dots, which probably represents the back of the shield, as the frame of an ox-hide shield consists of a circular rod with two crossbars.

“The idea of making the incuse represent the other side of the object given in relief on the obverse seems to be just the stage between a complete representation of the object, as in the tunny of Olbia, and that evinced by the early coins of Magna Græcia, on which the reverse gives in the incuse exactly the same form as that in relief on the obverse.”

The silphium plant of Cyrene, which yielded a salubrious but somewhat unpleasant medicine, has also been held to have a mythological symbolism, and without any evidence it has been foisted on to the hero Aristacus, “the protector of the corn-field and the vine and all growing crops, and bees and flocks and shepherds, and the averter of the scorching blasts of the Sahara.” “It seems far more reasonable to treat it on the same principle as the others just discussed. The silphium formed the most important article produced in that region, and it is perfectly in accordance with all analogy that certain quantities of this plant, and of the juice extracted from it, should be employed as money. At the present moment tea is so employed on the borders of Tibet and China, and raw cotton in Darfur.”

Professor Ridgeway argues that the same holds good for representations of cattle on coins—the image of the cow or the ox indicates that the gold piece so marked is a substitute for that animal.

These researches of Professor Ridgeway’s have thrown a new light on some of the images on Greek coins. He has transferred the symbolism of this class of coinage from the domain of religion to that of merchandise—from god to mammon.[140]