How Religion Affected Coinage

I’ll start with Christianity. I don’t think I can write about Islam without talking about Christianity, and I can’t talk about Syria without talking about Islam. Syria was a Roman province, mostly, before Islam, some fluidity on the eastern borders by the Persians, Today Antakya is a small city in southern Anatolia in Turkey, but in ancient times it was Antioch and considered the emporium of the east. It was the capital of the Roman province of Syria. Syria was the economic base of the Roman Empire in the east, confronting the other superpower of the period, which was then called Persia, and is now called Iran.

Human governance apparently started with physically strong, charismatic males doing whatever they pleased and could get away with, sometimes everyone else was lucky, just as often not. At a certain point people started trying to persuade the bullies to behave, and over time social structures were developed that tended to try to point violent people away from violence. Among those structures were bureaucracy and religion.

Earliest religions seemed built around the idea of loyalty to the deity or deities, channeled through the top male as the direct representative or actual incarnation of the deity, or through a priestly designated functionary. At some