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In the beginning there was only one Mint and no Mintmarks. Not one Mint for all the countries, but one Mint for each country. Then, as that county’s wealth grew and their capabilities grew alongside with it, there sprang up more and more Mints. These were called branch mints and did much the same thing as the original Mint did. The end. That should be the end of the story but it’s not. With each new Mint that sprang up there were more and coins produced. And with more and more coins being produced every year, it was only a short time until the villains of our story made an appearance. These villains being very clever, found ways and means of making their own coins for less cost, by using lower grade metals or by making the coins underweight. This naturally meant that the villains started to get rich. They could sell or trade the coins for their normal face value and make a profit because their production costs were less. This naturally upset the good people of the government who frowned upon such practices, and who set about immediately to find a way to upset the apple cart of these villains. It wasn’t that easy but they persevered, and came up with many a suggestion. However, all were discarded until finally someone came up with the brilliant idea to make it difficult to counterfeit any coins by placing a special mark on the coins to identify it. This naturally didn’t make sense to a lot of people. What good was putting a mark on coins when the villains would only create a newer die, cast or mould that would incorporate this mark? Well, said the brilliant person, if we put a different mark on all of the coins then they would find it difficult to do anything about it. But wait, he wasn’t done yet. When this brilliant person said to put a mark on each of the coins, in reality he meant to put an identifying mark on all of the coins saying where it was minted. You could have different Mint marks for each different mint, and each coin produced from that Mint would bear that Mint’s mark. In this way, you could keep track of how many coins were manufactured in each Mint and how many were put into circulation. So each Mint was given its very own special mintmark and each Mint put this very special mark on each of its coins. Except for the first Mints, because in the beginning when there was only one Mint for a country they naturally didn’t need to put a mintmark on their coins since they knew where the coins were being minted. This led to the practice, at least in the beginning of the first Mint not placing a mark on their coins. And this in itself was the identifier for those coins. Where there was no mintmark on a coin, it was assumed that the coin was minted at this first Mint. Not every country continues this practice of course. Sometimes they will have a mintmark for every Mint regardless of whether it was the first or not. But some countries, have decided to keep their initial, or main Mint, free of any mintmarks on their coins. And that’s how the mintmark was born. Muna wa Wanjiru is a web administrator and has been researching and reporting on internet marketing for years. For more information on Mint, visit his site at Mint
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