In a society without money and coins, barter was and is a solution. One item or service is exchanged for another. Certain things tend to be considered to be more valuable than others. A long time ago, cows were one of these. In ancient Greece cows were used to pay fines.
In Småland farmers in the 1500s had to pay fines with oxen following the Dacke War, a rebellion against the king. Metals were another valuable item.Cows were counted, whereas gold, silver, copper and iron were weighed. But weighing metals was an awkward method of payment.
About 2,600 years ago in Lydia (present-day Turkey), people began to make pieces of metal with a fixed weight, and stamp the weight directly on each piece. This is what we now call money. Because most coins were stamped with an image and text by using one or more hard blows, the act of making coins was called “striking”.The concept of coins spread from Lydia but the memory of using cattle as payment survived.
Many early antique coins featured pictures of oxen. In contrast, the first coins from Muslim countries only had text on them.