Thread: Electrum
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Old May 28th 05, 04:04 AM
Reid Goldsborough
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On 27 May 2005 18:25:10 -0700, "Mike Marotta"
wrote:

A few years back (late 2002, early 2003), I published an article in THE
CELATOR about electrum. My motivation for writing it was the erroneous
claim on rec.collecting.coins by Reid Goldsborough that Croesus of
Lydia put the world on a bimetallic standard.

Reid Goldsborough's webpages are all very interesting, loaded with
pictures and citations and heavily larded with words. The best analogy


I don't know exactly what the currently state of your mental condition
is, but I can guess. You're again, as you have in the past, posting a
fury of messages, here and elsewhere, that appear to have as their
primary purpose trying to contradict something I've written. You
should see somebody about this. Not healthy. In the past couple of
days you've posted here, on Moneta-L, and on CoinPeople material that
has this purpose. You get yourself in trouble not only because your
intentions are nakedly obvious, but because you say ludicrous things.

Here, in this loony thread, you criticize me, then post content from
your article that has nothing to do with your criticism, nothing to do
with what I've written in my articles or at my sites. I never wrote
what you said I wrote. I never wrote that "Croesus of Lydia put the
world on a bimetallic standard." I did write, in this newsgroup, this:
"In most parts of the Greek world, after Kroisos (Croesus) established
the bimetallic standard, minting authorities in the Greek world issued
coins of relatively pure gold and silver rather than electrum." Which
is true. I never said all minting authorities did this. I probably
should have said that electrum coinage did continue, isolated though
it was compared with other coinage.

Kroisos did in fact mint the first coins of pure silver and gold,
according to the evidence and beliefs of most (not all) scholars.
After silver coins came into existence, they were used as the standard
currency in most parts of the Greek world. Electrum was still used,
but because of its uncertain intrinsic value, because of the
uncertainty of its gold/silver ratio, it never achieved widespread use
as silver and gold did. Electrum coins are rare, and pricey, today,
for this reason, just as they were rare, comparatively speaking, in
the ancient world.

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