The GOLD

According to history, King Croesus of Lydia was the one who introduced gold coins around 643-630 B.C. A pale yellow mixture of gold and silver called the electrum was a natural resource in Lydia. As people did not know how to separate these two metals, the first gold coins were a mixture of gold and silver.

In 560 B.C., the Lydians found out a way to separate gold from silver. At last, real gold coins were produced along with silver coins, although gold was considered to be more precious than silver. In 546 B.C., the Lydians captured Persian army and when the Persians walked around the Lydian kingdom, they were astonished with the gold coins. The Persians started learning to mint gold coins and after some time they used them for trading.

In the past, one of the most progressive nations in the world was Persia and they popularized the used of gold coins around the world. As a result, gold coins became an important currency for commerce. Many nations used them for trading and for some people, collecting gold coins became a way to accumulate wealth.

After many centuries, gold coins were stopped being used as a currency in 1933 because most countries considered them too expensive. There are some gold colored coins today, but they do not contain any gold.

How to determine gold coin values

As gold coins are not circulated anymore, they become valuable. Many collectors are chasing them to add their collections and to gain profits from them. If you want to gain profits, it is essential for you to understand factors that affect gold coin values as discussed in this section.

The first factor is age where the older the coin, the higher its value. These coins are antique artifacts and their age can reach centuries old. Some tests can be done to check the coin's authenticity and age if you want to determine gold coin values based on this factor.

The second factor is condition. Weathered coins will have lower values than good condition coins. There are some qualities that collectors look for to determine gold coin quality, such as the sharpness of the relief, the text, and the edges. Normally it is more difficult to sell weathered coins than coins that are in a relatively good condition.

The last factor is its rarity. When a gold coin is extremely rare, its value will skyrocket. In general, there are two factors that affect rarity. The first is the number created and the second is the number of coins that has been lost, damaged, or destroyed. There is a rare double eagle $20 gold coin minted in 1933. It was worth more than $7 million in an auction.

Golden Rule, and the Gold Standard, to name only a few metaphors. Also, we have such commonplace sayings as heart of gold, good as gold, and so on. Perhaps the two best-known proverbs involving gold are "All that glistens is not gold" and "Gold is where you find it."

The Egyptians used the perfect of planar geometric figures, the circle, as the symbol for gold, the most perfect and noblest of the metals. The alchemists associated gold with the sun (Sol) or with the Greek sun-god (Apollo) and represented it by the symbol of perfection, the circle with a dot at the centre, or by the circle with a crown of rays to represent the king or Apollo of metals.

To the early Hindu philosophers gold was the "mineral light"; to the early Western philosophers the metal was the image of solar light and hence of the divine intelligence of the universe.

The desire for gold has markedly influenced history: the cry "gold" has lured men across oceans and continents, over the highest mountain ranges, into Arctic tundras and scorching deserts, and through nearly impenetrable jungles. Its gleam prompted the expeditions and conquests of Jason of Thessaly, Cyrus and Darius of Persia, Alexander of Macedon, Caesar of Rome, Columbus of Genoa, Vasco da Gama and Amerigo Vespucci of Portugal, Cortez and Pizzarro of Spain, Raleigh of England, and many others throughout history. Gold has carried the torch of civilization to the remotest regions of the world; unfortunately the auri sacra fames* has also wrought terrible acts of slavery, war, and bitter contention upon mankind. So it is also with most other materials of this earth.

To make gold from baser metals was a major preoccupation of the alchemists (as were also their ceaseless efforts to discover the elixir of life and the fountain of youth). The fruits of their labours gave us the rudiments of modern chemistry.

Gold has a widespread occurrence in practically every country of the world and has influenced the exploration and settlement of most. In Africa, Europe, and Asia ancient gold mines are known in Egypt, Spain, France, Great Britain, Yugoslavia, Romania, Greece, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Iran, India, China, Japan, and the U.S.S.R. Ancient placers have yielded gold from the rivers Tagus, Guadalquivir, Tiber, Po, Rhone, Rhine, Hebrus (Maritsa), Nile, Zambezi, Niger, Senegal, Pactolus (in ancient Lydia), Oxus (Amu Darya that flows through the golden land of Samarkand), Indus, Ganges, Lena, Aldan, Amur, Yangtze, and a multitude of others. The artisans of the earliest civilizations of Anatolia (Catal Hijyilk), Mesopotamia (Sumer), and the Indus Valley (Harappa and Mohenjo-Daro) worked in gold obtained from many sites in the Caucasus and Middle Asia, the Middle East, and the Indian Peninsula. The Egyptians mined gold extensively in eastern Egypt and Sudan (Nubia) as far back as 4,000 years ago. It was from them that the Persians, Greeks, and Romans in turn learned the techniques of gold prospecting, mining, and metallurgy. The Greeks and Romans mined gold ores from the extensive metalliferous regions of their empires. Pliny the Elder (A.D. 23-79) in his Historia naturalist written in the early years of our era, repeatedly mentions the mining and metallurgy of gold, and during the Renaissance Agricola referred to it, as had many others before him during the Middle Ages.

Compared with the gold placers and mines of the Old World, those in parts of the New may be as ancient, although it would appear that the aborigines of North and South America placed little emphasis on gold beyond its use in ornaments, jewellery, sacrificial knives, and the like. Columbus of Genoa found the natives of Hispaniola (Haiti) in possession of gold nuggets in 1492, a fact that excited the Spaniards to later pursue their conquests of Mexico and South America, where in 1550 they found their Eldorado in the fabulous placer deposits of Colombia. In Brazil the Portuguese sought gold during the last half of the sixteenth century, but the deposits found were small and mined only sporadically during the seventeenth century. In 1693 economic deposits of gold were discovered in Minas Geraes, and for a century thereafter this state was one of the world's major sources of the precious metal. One of these deposits, the famous Morro Velho, has been mined by underground workings for almost a century and a half and is still productive.

Although silver has been the most important precious metal of Mexico, gold has also been won from many of the silver-gold deposits, mostly of Tertiary age. The bedrock deposits of the great silver-gold vein system of the Veta Madre at Guanajuato were found in 1550 and exploited almost immediately thereafter. El Oro, one of the premier gold districts but now largely exhausted, was discovered in 1521, developed extensively by 1530, and mined intermittently for nearly 400 years thereafter, producing more than 5 million oz. of gold.host a gold party