Gold coins have a long history, dating back several thousand years across a huge sampling of the great civilizations and empires. As far back as the 2nd millennia B.C., gold was used as a means of valuation and gift giving. These weren’t actually circulated coins and currency.

These were used as taxes from citizens to rulers, exchanged between rulers of different areas and consisted of crude shapes. This was seen in Egypt and other civilizations in the region, as well as the Chinese civilization of the same time period.

Hundreds of years later it was the Lydian king Croesus is said to have credited the first true gold coins. This was in the in the 6th century B.C., and followed the 7th century Lydian production of coins using electrum.

Electrum was deposited in their riverbeds and consisted of a mixture of both gold and silver. It was not until the next century when the Lydians were able to separate the two metals from each other.

They then released both gold and silver coins and were the first to be credited as circulating true gold coins anywhere in the world. Early gold coins from here and other civilizations, such as from the Celtic tribes, often featured the depiction of powerful animals on their coinage such as bulls or lions.

The Greeks primarily used silver coins until Alexander the Great and his father Phillip of Macedonia acquired a large collection of gold, gold coins and gold sources from their conquests of the Persian Empire and throughout Asia.

However, silver was still predominately used for the majority of coin circulation. Gold was used often as a means of payment to the soldier in the army. This was a choice of convenience. As the armies conquered and acquired gold, gold was more readily available for them to be paid with than for the rest of the empire as a whole.

This was largely true of the Roman Empire that followed. The Romans circulated and created coins on an enormous scale, as they did with most other facets of life. Coins were usually minted out of the most readily available metals.

With an empire as vast as the Roman’s was, from the tips of Western Europe all the way across and down into Asia, coins were variably bronze, copper, silver and gold.

After the death of Julius Cesar, gold coins became used more frequently and then became the dominant coin issuance. The Greeks had begun putting the faces of their emperors and rulers on their coinage, and the Romans followed suit as well. To this day there is a large sampling of Roman gold coins that remain in collections.

Following the end of the Roman empires, as Europe fell into the Middle Ages, it was left to the Persian and Islamic countries to maintain the use of gold coins. This continued until Italy led the path out of the Dark Ages and into the Renaissance.

With international trade and exploration, gold again became a dominant figure in coins. This lasted until modern times and varied based on available supplies. It was not until the United States and many other countries went off the Gold Standard in the 20th century that gold coins fell out of favor as a means of circulated currency.