on the coins of Crete point back to the days when real kettles formed the chief medium of exchange? But far stronger evidence is at hand to show that the tunny fish was used as a monetary unit in some parts of Hellas. We have had occasion to refer to the city of Olbia which lay on the north shore of the Black Sea. It was a Milesian colony, and was the chief Greek emporium in this region. There are bronze coins of this city made in the shape of fishes, and inscribed ΘΥ, which has been identified as the abbreviation θύννος, tunny. Others are inscribed ΑΡΙΧΟ, which Koehler read as τάριχος, salt fish, but which the distinguished German numismatist Von Sallet15 regards as meaning a basket (ἄρριχος). He holds those marked ΘΥ as the legal price of a tunny fish, those marked ΑΡΙΧΟ as that of a basket of fish16. When we recall the Chinese bronze cowries, the Burmese silver shells, the silver fish-hooks of the Indian Ocean, the little hoes and knives of China, and the miniature axes from Africa, we are constrained to believe that in those coins of Olbia, shaped like a fish, we have a distinct proof of the influence on the Greek mind of the same principle which has impelled other peoples to imitate in metal the older object of barter which a metal currency is replacing. The inhabitants of Olbia were largely intermixed with the surrounding barbarians, and may therefore have felt some difficulty in replacing their barter unit by a round piece of metal bearing merely the imprint of a fish, while the pure-blooded Greek of Cyzicus had no hesitation in mentally bridging the gulf between a real fish and a piece of metal merely stamped with a fish, and did not require the intermediate step of first shaping his metal unit into the form of a tunny. We shall find that this tendency to shape metal into the form of the object which it supplants may perhaps be traced in the coins of Aegina and Boeotia.
