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Gold and Silver Coins Overview
Home » Coin Collecting » Gold and Silver Coins » Gold and Silver Coins OverviewCoins have been in use for more than 2,600 years, and people have collected them for nearly as long. The technical name for the practice of collecting coins is numismatics, a term derived from the Greek word nomisma, meaning “coin” or “currency.” Numismatics includes the study of coins, banknotes, medals, tokens, and primitive forms of money. Governments and other official agencies issue billions of coins annually, and collecting coins is a popular hobby around the world.
Over the centuries, coin designs varied considerably in beauty and complexity. The first coins had a crude design on one side and nothing more than a simple punch mark on the other. Within a few hundred years, coins of great artistic beauty were being struck in Greece and then in Rome. As the Roman Empire declined in the 3rd and 4th centuries, so did the quality of its coins. In the Early Middle Ages, most coins struck throughout the Western world were crude and ugly. But by the 15th century, Europe had begun to produce beautiful coins and medals of outstanding workmanship and artistic design.
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