Watch List notes:

JDL Collection Part II: Geek Coins
ASIA. IONIA.

Uncertain IONIAN MINT, Trite 600–550, Lydo-Milesian standard, EL 4.64 g.

Obv. Geometric pattern in the shape of a four-branch star divided into four parts by a cross.
Rev. Incuse rectangle with geometric ornaments dividing the surface into ten compartments; in two compartments, pellets; all within rectangular incuse.
Literature
Traité II/1 - cf. 5, pl. I, 4 (hecte) BMC Ionia -
SNG Copenhagen 318
L. Weidauer, Probleme der frühen Elektronprägung, Typos 1, Fribourg , 1975, -
K. Konuk, From Kroisos to Karia: early Anatolian Coins from the Muharrem Kayhan Collection, Istanbul, 2003, 8
Rosen 12
Zhuyuetang 2
M.-M. Bendenoun, Coins of the Ancient World, A portrait of the JDL Collection, Tradart, Genève, 2009, 24 (this coin)
Condition
Very rare. About extremely fine.

Provenance
Jean Vinchon Numismatique, Paris, October 2000, lot 216.
Coinage was born in Asia Minor around 600 BCE. At the time it was composed of small, standard-sized lumps of electrum-a natural alloy of gold and silver-which merely needed to be counted out, rather than weighed, during a transaction, because the imprint of the state seal guaranteed its metallic value, which is what distinguished it from its an- cestors. Indeed, the "grains" and pieces of silver or copper ingots, or rings of silver, and so on, that had served as me- thods of payment among trading peoples in the Near East for millennia had to be weighed with every transaction.
Two ancient Greek authors from Anatolia, the historian Herodotus and the philosopher Xenophanes, attributed the invention of coins to the Lydians, whose kingdom dominated Asia Minor in the seventh and early sixth century BCE. Seve- ral crucial discoveries seem to confirm their assertions.
The Artemesium, or temple of Artemis in Ephesus on the west coast of what is now Turkey, was considered in Antiquity to be one of the Seven Wonders of the World. It was redis- covered around 1870 thanks to excavations led by J. T. Wood. Croesus, the extremely rich king of Lydia (560–546 BCE) had had the Artemesium rebuilt around 560 BCE on the ruins of earlier temples.
Excavations of the underlying foundations carried out in 1904–05 and pursued in 1985–86 therefore turned up some archaeological finds of great interest, in particularly roughly one hundred electrum coins, considered to be the oldest in existence. The archaeological context in which they were unearthed, along with scholarly studies of the coins themselves, have dated the time of their minting-hence the birth of coinage itself-between 600 and 560 BCE. Some of them were issued by Greek city-states along the coast or on the Ionian Islands, while others were issued by the Lydian king, Alyattes, the father of Croesus.