La Monnaie dans l'Antiquité, tome I

Lenormant’s first volume is a synthetic history of the emergence and early spread of coinage. It draws on literary sources, ancient weights, inscriptions, and the coin types known in the 1870s to discuss invention, chronology, and the relationship between money and political authority. Researchers can use it to reconstruct nineteenth-century debates about Lydia, Aegina, and other claimed centers of invention and to trace arguments repeated in later manuals.

The work predates modern archaeology, scientific metal analysis, and most systematic hoard publication. Treat its absolute dates, diffusion models, weight-standard genealogies, and historical narratives as evidence for nineteenth-century scholarship, and test them against current numismatic and economic research.