Mint Condition Transcript Gabriel Tongaawhikau This podcast is brought to you by Tāmaki Paenga Hira Auckland War Memorial Museum. Ian Proctor
Think about the last time you paid for something with a coin. It might even be a bit of an occasion to clear out the loose change rattling about your wallet, but for a couple of thousand years of history, coins were an essential part of daily exchange and identity. They are among the most durable and revealing artefacts from the ancient world, often the only things that survive from entire periods of history. Bronze, silver, gold, minted, circulated, hoarded. They've travelled between hands, across borders and through centuries, and around 22,000 of them from all corners of the world have made their way into our collection. Kia ora, I'm Ian Proctor, your host for this episode of The Amp, the podcast from Auckland Museum that amplifies the incredible stories from our collections, our mahi and our place in the Pacific. Today, we're delving into the world of coins, but we're not just cracking open a wallet and seeing what's inside? We're looking at some of the oldest and rarest coins, from ancient Rome to present day, tiny, often tarnished objects, some much smaller than a button. They may be small, but the stories they hold are massive. In the life cycle of a coin, from minting to spending to falling out of use, a museum is often one of the final resting places. But why is that? Before widespread access to international travel…and then the internet opening up our world, the goal for many museums was to collect as much as possible, to document as many things about life, history and people as they could fit within the walls. This approach is what we call encyclopaedic, literally trying to be a physical version of Wikipedia. Coins were no exception, and as a century and a half old museum, we have a whole lot. They're part of our numismatic collection. Numismatics is the study and collection of currency, including coins, bank notes, tokens and medals. That's right, your wheat Bix triathlon medal might one day be sitting in the collection of a museum. Like for individual collectors, the museum aimed to collect at least one of each type, every denomination, country or year of production, and also rare or unusual items. The goal now is to share the stories behind the coins. Rather than complete the set. These days, we prefer our collections to tell stories about the people, culture and environment of today in the past, both in New Zealand and the wider Pacific. My role at the museum is Collection Documentation Manager, my team of collection technicians, make sure that all objects in the museum's care have an accurate digital record of what it is, where it came from and where it's stored. We transcribe paper records, extract information from the object itself, photograph and research our taonga so it's easy to uncover their stories, both within the museum's walls and online. For the past year, we've been working through our numismatic collection, coin by coin, bank note by bank note, ensuring each one has its own individual record.
Ian Proctor
Coins are just one part of the global story of currency. Before money, successful, communities worked together to provide food and get tasks done, but over time, a system of trade developed. Say you are a blacksmith. Why hunt for your dinner when you can get meat in exchange for making the arrows needed by your customer, the hunter, you could carry on working on what you did best with a way to swap and share with your neighbours who specialise in their own things, all made possible by a shared idea of value. But before coins, as we know them today, this looked pretty different from place to place.
Emma Prideaux 04:42Coins are basically a symbolic unit of value which is attached to an external understanding of wealth or value. So traditionally, especially in western societies, it's gold because gold…it doesn't rot, it doesn't decay, it doesn't change. It's always going to be gold. Gold is also very valuable because it doesn't tarnish, like a lot of other metals, and it's visually pleasing. But that's not the only type of coin you'll get. My name is Emma Prideaux, and I'm a conservator working for Auckland Museum.
Ian Proctor Shelling out for the things you wanted to buy was quite a literal undertaking in some parts of the world. Emma Prideaux In like Oceania, India, China and Africa, cowry shells and other types of shells were like great for the same reason. They were shiny, they were valuable. People liked them decoratively, but they also didn't decay, and you could just trade it from people to people to people. Ian Proctor
Coffee, cotton, spices and porcelain were all favoured commodities at times. In medieval Russia, even squirrel pelts were a popular form of exchange. Emma Prideaux The peoples of Yap will have giant round stone monies, which just they don't move. They're not very tradable, but they are an externalisation of wealth. Ian Proctor
Sometimes weighing several tonnes. These rai stones were used in major social transactions like marriage, political deals and apologies. Their ownership was passed on through oral tradition, showing how value can be deeply social, not just physical. Some of the oldest and most unusual forms of coins in our collection don't look like coins at all. About 2500 years ago, in the kingdoms of Ancient China, coins known as knife money, were used these cast bronze coins were shaped like barbers’ razors with a slightly curved blade and a handle at one end. Before that, actual knives were traded. Another type of coin in China around that time was known as spade money, because they were shaped Sure enough, just like spades in coins. The first known coins started appearing around 1000 BCE, and they were pretty basic.
Emma Prideaux
So first you've got to ask, what is a coin? But for the normal definition of a coin, it's a kind of press and stamp kind of method, or you can also do things to bring the surface and change the quality of the surface to get a certain effect. One of the earliest coins were the Lydian coins, which is sort of based, sort of in the Turkey region. And they began to be minted in an area that naturally had a lot of gold just turning up from a river. As the river eroded away the surrounding stone, and they started taking out these little lumps of gold and smashing it between a hammer and a hard thing with a design printed on it, and smooshed it. And then you have a piece of gold from a known ruler. And as you go along, you have different ways of manufacturing coins, moving on from the gold, the silver, the copper to kind of changing the components so you've got more base metals for some reasons, or increasing the amount of metals for various reasons.
Ian Proctor Once you have a coin in your hand. How do you tell what it is? Emma Prideaux
So firstly, I'm just kind of like materially, what is it? Is it metal? So if it's metal, is it bronze? Is it silver? Is it copper? Do you think it might be one of those things? You can identify these things visually, but sometimes things are tricks you in. So you start off with a base assumption. Then for more modern coins, but also in antiquity, you sometimes have numbers on it. So look for any visually identifiable signs of like when it was made. This doesn't have to be just kind of date stamped on. If you've got a symbol of a government that you can recognise, for example, or if there is a Roman looking dude, you can potentially narrow it down. Also how worn the coin is. Obviously, it could be that it was just in some guy's pocket for like, a really long time and it's just worn to nothing. But generally, the more wear, the more hands it's exchanged with, possibly the older it is where it was found. If you know that it was dug up in your mate's garden, you're like, well, it's probably at a certain provenance. But if you found it on an archaeological dig, you'll be like, Oh, I think it comes from this date range, yes, looking at the shape, the colour, the symbols, and then you move on from there, going all the way to people have used SEM, which is scanning electron microscope, to just look at the structure of the coins to try and work out how it was made, because that can tell you some information.
Ian Proctor With all that figured out, it's time to play heads or tails. The obverse side, or what most of us know as heads, will usually show the year it was issued, an inscription and a bus showing the ruler or head of state, and the reverse tails often includes inscriptions as well as mint markings and crests with symbols important to the state where it was used Baily Vallings
So most of the coins that we've been working with were a European and so have got either English text or, more commonly, Latin text. And so finding letters like DG, which would translate to by the grace of God would indicate that it's a European coin from a monarchy. And so, from there, we sort of go through and look for where it's from, if it says FR - France. And so, we can just sort of narrow things down from there, if it doesn't have any familiar script on, it makes things a bit harder. We use a lot of digital tools now, Google lens has been remarkable. It is quite good at positively identifying coins, and I find using the database that Numista has put together is also really useful. They've done a remarkable job. It's basically Wikipedia for coins. It's been very handy.
Ian Proctor That's Baily Vallings, a collection documentation technician who works alongside Emma in our collection care team. Baily Vallings So I'm just in the numismatic store now, and we've got boxes and boxes and boxes full of coins, floor to ceiling. It's taller than I am, and we've got all these wonderful grey, acid free boxes that we put all of our coins into, I'll just grab one out.
Ian Proctor Each box contains hundreds of coins carefully tucked into individual clear sleeves to protect them from damage and from anything else that might degrade them. Baily Vallings
We've got coins from all over the world. We've actually got a really sizable collection of coins from China. And these are quite cool, because their value is in the metal that they're made of, not what it says on them. So because of that, they were used as an exchange medium, far beyond the empire of China. In fact, in the Otago gold fields, they were used by Chinese gold miners as an exchange currency. We've also got a significant sample of Ottoman and Turkish coins. A lot of these would have been collected by New Zealand soldiers overseas and then come back with them when they came home.
Ian Proctor Our numismatic store is home to 1000s of coins, bank notes, medals and tokens. There's just so much history wrapped up in each item. Baily Vallings
I'll be honest, when I came into the numismatic collection, I didn't really care about coins that much, but getting to know it, you see, just such a diversity of time and place, and we don't really think about coins, especially nowadays, when a lot of our commerce has gone into using our eftpos cards or just buying online, some people have got coins in their wallets. Now a lot of us don't, but for a really long time, they were just a staple of life, you would exchange, you would spend these coins, you'd get them, and the faces on these coins have probably seen a lot more than we ever will, just because they've been through so many hands. They've touched so many lives, and then eventually they've come to us, and I do think that's quite special.
Ian Proctor
Today, like paper money, it's what coins represent that's valuable, rather than the coin itself. But way back in the day, a coin's value was wrapped up in what it was made from, there's an honesty in metal that just makes shopping easier by rolling out a set of coins that weighed the same and were made of the same thing. Someone looking to sell a loaf of bread would know one customer's coin was as good as the next. Bye, bye, bartering. Hello, big business, standardising coins was an early step on the long trade road to family squabbles over the Monopoly board. Consistent coins opened up a world of trade opportunity with exchanges made much more efficient and reliable, even across vast distances. You may not have seen eye to eye with your neighbours, but at the end of the day, a lump of gold was a lump of gold because coins were valued for their metallic worth. You can track changes in the economic fortunes and misfortunes of the states that produced them. When times were good, the crème de la crème of coins would be minted. One of the coins in our collection started its circulation in silver, but as the economy took a turn, the value of the coin was watered down all the way to bronze. It's a mid-third century CE bronze coin depicting the Emperor Gallienus, and it shows the Emperor wearing a crown of radiating spikes. Ouch, when it was first introduced in 215 CE, it was made of silver, but it gradually became less and less pure until it was entirely minted in bronze. This is what we call debasing. When the state needed to pinch pennies, so to speak, they would dilute the purity of their coins or make them smaller, leaving more pure metal in the coffers and cheaper money in people's purses.
Emma Prideaux
So the basement is where the government changes the percentage of types of metals in coins, specifically metal coins. So what it can tell you is generally, demand is outstripping supply in some kind of way. Money, especially minted money, is considered the preserve of a government, so the government tightly controls that. So if the percentage of gold that the government is officially putting into the money, that could suggest that the local mines are running dry. And so you've got to change up the amount of metal in certain coins to keep the money flowing, or demand is increasing and outstripping your ability to create these coins. So it's not that the mines are drying up. There's just more coins that need to go into circulation, or it can be an indication of horrible inflation. And so especially in the Roman period, there were times where they started changing the percentages of the coins and the amount of metal. And the Roman understanding of economics wasn't great. And so having not enough money to pay your debts, the Roman solution was to make more money. And they made more money by watering down essentially the amount of like pure metal, which caused problems, because a lot of the intrinsic value of the money at that time was just in the amount of metal in the coin, whereas now we can add different proportions of metal to our coins.
Ian Proctor And of course, what I guess you could consider the ultimate albeit unethical savings technique just going ahead and making your own coins. Emma Prideaux
So I suppose one of the interesting things about forgeries and fakes is that having the coin in itself has become a status symbol. So if I take $1 out of my pocket and be like, you want to spend $10 on this dollar, they're like, nah, nah. That's like, it's worth exactly $1 I know exactly how much that is. With the forgeries and fakes, the the value of that coin for both real and for the fakes have been sort of separated from its actual value and moving into the intrinsic value like an art piece. And that can be for status reasons. So it's a interesting reflection on the movement from actual value to symbolic and mythological history-based value. But again, like with real coins, it can tell people the methods. It's always fun to see how sloppy it's done, and it's always fun to look at where they came from, why and what the story was behind it. Because in a lot of forgeries, across a lot of artifacts, there's an interesting story behind it, because you've got to somehow pass it into the legitimate art scene, money scene. You can't be like, I found this cool coin. You've got to be like. This cool coin has been in my family for generations, and it was given to him like, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great grandfather, personally by Nero himself, because otherwise people are going to look at it and try and work out where it came from. So I think half the fun is the stories people tell themselves about the coins and the forgeries, either by the forgers or the people who have been told these stories. Because, of course, forgeries aren't a new thing.
Ian Proctor We have a few interesting counterfeit coins in our collection. Emma Prideaux
The King Charles coin is one of my favourite and most hated of objects, because it's very confusing. From my perspective, the coin is a maddening mix of features. It is when you first look at it, it seems to be a normal King Charles coin, where you look at it from a distance, then when you turn it onto the side, it's got a weird band of orange running directly in the centre. I've described it as a Christmas coin, those little coins that you get at Christmas, which is the fall on the outside and the chocolate on the inside. But instead of delicious chocolate, it's a mystery orange substance.
Ian Proctor
This particular coin might look a little rough around the edges, and that's because it is. It was struck in a hurry during a civil war, a conflict that pitted King Charles the First against various opposing forces across England, Scotland and Ireland at the time. These coins weren't just currency. They were also tools of loyalty and morale, with hastily made pieces often distributed as payments to soldiers fighting for the king. This was a practical incentive to keep them on his side and not be swayed by promises from the opposition. But also provided an opportunity for scoundrels to slip a counterfeit coin into circulation.
Emma Prideaux
When we weighed the coin, it was 30 grams less than it should have been. So we know that 30 grams at that point would have been noticeable, but not super noticeable. Generally, in that time period, they didn't have very fine scale balances unless you were talking to a professional Goldsmith. But if you were passing it just between people, people might not have noticed. It might have felt heavy enough. I wonder whether it's a more modern forgery, just because of the composition is decidedly off. But it is hard to say exactly what or when the forgery happened. It's definitely not a real coin. We can say that for certain. So one of the things that I did when I had a look at it after getting very frustrated, is pointing a PXRF on it. Now, a PXRF is, oh, I would describe it sort of like a ray gun that fires radiation to an object in the same way that our eyes see. So I see because light bounces off an object and into our eyeballs and that registers the cells and the cells at the back of the eyes as colours, and that's how we perceive a spectrum. In the same way, we're firing radiation, quite cool, safely, with all the safety precautions, at the object. The object then gets excited, and it sends back, essentially, a signal. So we know that it's, you know, made of gold, made of silver, made of copper, any of the metals or things like arsenic, obviously, thankfully, no arsenic, but we did get a reading on this quote, unquote silver coin, finding out it's mostly copper, which isn't something that should happen. So the theory is that they may have enriched the service with silver. This has happened pretty much since coins were invented. And also it's important because, well, Charles lost and then lost his head shortly after. So that's like it makes it a collector's item, sort of part of a doomed crusade.
Ian Proctor
Another striking coin in our collection is a silver drachma minted in Roman Alexandria some 2000 years ago, around 40 CE, during the reign of Emperor Claudius. On the obverse side heads, we see Claudius portrait, and on the reverse side, there's a standing female figure, believed to be Messalina, Claudius, first wife, but she's not looking her best. There's still a faint image of the bust, but it's been flattened out at the top corner where her hair was, and that's stretched and warped what was the coin's rounded edge. It looks like it's been probably hit with a hammer, but this damage isn't random. Messalina was a victim of damnatio memoriae. Damnatio memoriae is the ancient Roman practice that literally means condemnation of memory. If you really, really annoyed someone in power, they would remove you from history. Getting cancelled isn't something unique to our lovely social media era. If you fell out of favour in the Roman Empire, the state would simply stamp you out of collective memory. It's a pretty powerful thought that your enemies could quite literally rewrite history and leave you out of it. Your statues smashed, inscriptions chiselled out, your name wouldn't have been so much as whispered. In this case, we understand that she was executed by her husband, the emperor, after being accused of infidelity and then marrying another man while Claudius was away from Rome, the Senate then ordered the damnatio memoriae in. However, clearly, this effort wasn't entirely successful, as some depictions of her, like this coin in our collection remain. But of course, why let a tiff between lovers disrupt business? We can't be sure who to face this coin or why, but perhaps the owner wanted to keep its monetary value without returning it to be melted down. What is clear is that this tiny object carries the weight of politics, power and personal downfall, another remarkable coin in our collection. It's not just rare. It's a glimpse into a fleeting and chaotic moment in history. It's a copper coin minted during the three month reign of Emperor Otho, or Otho. Now Otho, Otho is not a household name, and that might have something to do with his short stint on the throne. He was the second ruler in 69 CE, what became known as the year of the four emperors.
Baily Vallings This coin, it's it's quite cool, because it's a coin from Emperor he ruled for three months. So the fact that we've got one means that a it had to be minted in the three months that he was Emperor and then survive the 2000 years since he was Emperor to get to us. Ian Proctor
Otho died by suicide three months into the job. His tragic end reflected a dark and tumultuous time in ancient Rome and his desperation to avoid further Civil War, stating it is far more just to perish, one for all than many for one, this coin, about the size of a watch face, captures a sliver of that unrest. It's a reminder of how quickly power could rise and fall in ancient Rome, and how even a short lived emperor could leave behind a legacy, in this case, struck into copper ancient coins were also used to show how a state wanted to present itself. Think of it as PR by coin. If you were a new emperor on the scene and you wanted to big up your profile, your minted image was a good way to show your projected persona.
Emma Prideaux From the most basic it can tell the reach. It can tell the technology level, it can tell people what materials are available to that society, but also what they find valuable, maybe even what they find aesthetically pleasing. You can tell what their favourite animal is like, not in a kind of like I really like giraffes, but you can tell what the national symbol is. And from that, you can kind of tell the sort of their mythologies, their values, that kind of thing. Ian Proctor
Greek coins often featured gods and mythological creatures that linked their cities to divine favour and military prowess. Roman coins, on the other hand, showed emperors and personifications of virtues. Baily Vallings
The way I look at coins is that they are art through the lens of the state, the people that are ruling. It is what the people at the top value most. And so you can see that it's the king right there. It's their coat of arms in states where the king is not so important, it is the constitution. Ian Proctor The use of certain symbols also marked key moments in history, including times of rebellion. Baily Vallings
With the French coins, the coin that I looked at in particular was from the Revolutionary period, and so it's got very interesting symbology. In addition to the fact that it had King Louis' head on it before he lost it. Ian Proctor The coins show fasces, insignia of official authority in ancient Rome, an a Phrygian cap, soft hat with a pointed crown that leans forward. It looks a bit like what you might see on a garden gnome, and was a symbol of liberty.
Baily Vallings Those signs are explicitly revolutionary, and so you see them in Revolutionary France, you see them in revolutionary Mexico, the United States, even these symbols are they say something about the people that are making them. Ian Proctor
Even in modern times, there's an element of posturing at play with Commonwealth coins, including ours. In Aotearoa, you may not have noticed or been alive long enough to but between monarchs, the direction the head is facing changes from ruler to ruler. This tradition is believed to have begun with King Charles, the second son of King Charles, the first of chocolate coin fame that Emma told us about after years in exile, Charles the second was restored to the throne following the death of Oliver Cromwell. Cromwell had played a central role in the execution of Charles the First. So when his son came to power and restored the monarchy, he wanted to make a clear symbolic break from that turbulent chapter in history. One subtle but lasting way he did this was by. Choosing to have his portrait facing the opposite direction to Cromwell's beginning a royal tradition that still continues today. Since then, British monarchs have continued to alternate the direction they face with each new reign. There's only been one major exception. When Edward the eighth came to the throne, he preferred his left side and broke with tradition by choosing to face the same direction as his father, George the fifth. But his reign was short lived, and he abdicated before any coins were officially issued. So the pattern resumed with George the sixth, and has carried on ever since. Today, King Charles the third's coins show him facing to the left, continuing a centuries old tradition shaped by history, personal preference and a little drama. Here in Aotearoa, New Zealand, even the coins and notes we carry in our wallets tell a story about who we are with our flash, modern day Tech, we can do all sorts of storytelling with our coins. They're so symbolic now that it's not the metal they're valued for.
Emma Prideaux
Generally, it's made by mints. There'll be a certain amount of mints that can mint official coinage. They'll be designed. The design will be pushed through onto the factory floor, and there's just hundreds and hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of these things. It's worth noting that the copper coins, the gold coins and the silver coins are not exactly that anymore. There's other metals mixed in, I believe, nickel in the copper ones off the top of my head, so they're no longer units of value. It is worth noting that now, I think in most places, the lowest denomination coins cost more money to make than their value.
Ian Proctor
Next time you hold a 10-cent coin, take a closer look at it. The beautiful Māori carved head you'll see is a koru. They're often found on far Inui. It's such a striking symbol that speaks to Te Ao Māori and reminds us of the importance of whakapapa identity and connection to place. On the $1 coin, you'll find the iconic kiwi, a bird so synonymous with New Zealand we've adopted its name for ourselves. It's surrounded by another globally recognized emblem, the silver fern. These designs aren't just for show. They're visual markers of our national identity. Our banknotes tell their own stories too, featuring some of our most influential figures, Sir Edmund Hillary, Sir Āpirana Ngata, Ernest Rutherford and Kate Sheppard. Together, the images chosen for our currency reflect who we are, our people, our values and our environment. They weave history into the everyday. In a way, our currency becomes a pocket-sized portrait of our identity, quietly carrying the stories of Aotearoa wherever it goes despite their small size, coins contain incredible amounts of detail that can tell us so much about the past. At the museum, we continue to study and care for coins, not just as currency, but as storytellers, coins from ancient Rome, medieval Europe or Imperial China can all be crucial pieces of a grand historical puzzle. They can tell us about religion, politics, history, economics and cultural exchange long after the fall of the societies that produced them in. That was ‘Mint Condition’, written by Laura Skerritt, Steph Strock and me Ian Proctor. Sound design by Sara O'Brien and production support from Annabel Walker. The executive producer was Teresa Cowie from Connect Content. Thanks to our guests, Emma Prideaux and Baily Vallings. To find out more about the museum's coin collection, to look at photos of some of the coins we've talked about today, or to read our blogs, see our show notes. If you're enjoying The Amp, help others to find us by leaving a review or sharing this episode with your friends and whānau.