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The Celts only really started minting coins when they couldn’t get enough of the foreign coins they were becoming used to. They started out making near identical copies of these, but gradually developed the imagery to be their own until the final results are unrecognisable. We’ll cover this in detail in a later section, but for now, we’ll take a look some of the major coins that the Celts used as prototypes, and look at how they changed them over the years.
As a very rough guide:
- the Celts in Colchis (present day Georgia) used gold staters based on Alexander III gold staters and Lysimachus gold staters
- the Eastern Celts used silver tetradrachms based on Alexander III and Philip III tetradrachms, Thasos tetradrachms and Philip II tetradrachms
- the Celts from Northern Gaul and Central Europe (to the west of Lake Constance) used gold staters based on Philip II of Macedon gold staters, and gold staters based on a Philip V silver tetradrachm
- the Celts of Cisalpine Gaul and southern Gaul used silver for their coins, and based them on coins from Massalia, Rhode and Emporium as they traded with these cities and a common currency was useful. This article doesn’t discuss these silver coins any further, but I’ll try and get round to them at some point
Approximate boundaries of the prototype coins
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