The site was created and maintained by like-minded people who are united by the idea of collecting gold coins from ancient times to the present. Our collection we call
"Coins of 100 generations".
Coins appeared a little less than 2700 years ago (c. 650 BC), and you can feel the meaning of this figure well by imagining that your 100 times grandfather held one of the first coins. The depth of one's own genus in 100 generations is an incredible abyss of time! Suffice it to say that the genealogy of Jesus given in the Gospel of Luke is only 75 generations before the first Man created in Eden - Adam!
Of course, this is a clear legacy of the pre-literate tradition, which is raising an immemorial generation to the Divine.
So, Alexander the Great, built his genus on the mothers side to Achilles, the son of the Nereid (sea goddess), and on the fathers side to Hercules, that is, in about 35 generations directly to Zeus.
In contrast to this state of affairs, Herodotus tells about the genealogy of the Egyptian priests family in 345 generations, the statues of each member of which, from father to son, he saw personally ...
His History, written c. 450-440 BC, consists of what the author was able to read, personally see and feel, but mostly hear from other people. Therefore, the stories from the first book, devoted to the history of the Lydian Kingdom, are largely a legend, in which there was already a place for mentioning coins.
Just imagine that the first coins "remember":
- Tablets of the Covenant, given by God to Moses (not yet lost);
- Chaldean astrologer on top of the Tower of Babel;
- the construction of at least five, and possibly six Wonders of the World, because undoubtedly only the Great Pyramids were built in the pre-coin era;
- the Assyrian king Ashurbanipal, who, in his own words, "is familiar with the antediluvian records on stone", and his cuneiform library today is the largest and oldest collection of texts, among which the Epic of Gilgamesh was discovered;
- the journey of Phoenician sailors around Africa, executed near 600 BC by order of Pharaoh Necho II. An event comparable in scale to the affairs of the era of the Great Geographical Discoveries 2000 years after;
- the exit of ships from the Red Sea to the Mediterranean through the "Pharaonic Canal" - the ancient analogue of the Suez Canal;
- and many other things that seem incredible, almost fabulous ...
Being its origin back in legendary time, generation after generation, the coins introduce us to mythological creatures, gods and heroes, allow us to look into the time of the Greco-Persian wars and the conquests of Alexander the Great, step by step to see the rise and fall of Rome, through the veil of the Dark Ages to consider the beauty of icon painting on the nomismas of Byzantium and Gothic patterns on the coins of medieval Europe, the rise of the culture of the Renaissance and the rethinking of ancient images on the coins of modern times.
I would like to believe that even just looking at the photo of the coins from the gallery of our site, you can experience a feeling similar to that felt by Herodotus, passing along the 345 statues of priests from father to son - a feeling of an endless chain of time in which each of us is only a link, but without such link there is no the whole chain ...