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The invention of banking preceded that of coinage. Banking originated in Ancient Mesopotamia where the royal palaces and temples provided secure places for the safe-keeping of grain and other commodities. Receipts came to be used for transfers not only to the original depositors but also to third parties. Eventually private houses in Mesopotamia also got involved in these banking operations and laws regulating them were included in the code of Hammurabi.

In Egypt too the centralization of harvests in state warehouses also led to the development of a system of banking. Written orders for the withdrawal of separate lots of grain by owners whose crops had been deposited there for safety and convenience, or which had been compulsorily deposited to the credit of the king, soon became used as a more general method of payment of debts to other persons including tax gatherers, priests and traders.

Precious metals, in weighed quantities, were a common form of money in ancient times. The transition to quantities that could be counted rather than weighed came gradually. A History of Money points out that the words "spend", "expenditure", and "pound" (as in the main British monetary unit) all come from the Latin "expendere" meaning "to weigh". the author points out that the basic unit of weight in the Greek speaking world was the "drachma" or "handful" of grain, but the precise weight taken to represent this varied considerably, for example from less than 3 grams in Corinth to more than 6 grams in Aegina. Throughout much of the ancient world the basic unit of money was the stater, meaning literally "balancer" or "weigher". The talent is a monetary unit with which we are familiar with from the Parable of the Talents in the Bible. The talent was also a Greek unit of weight, about 60 pounds.

Many primitive forms of money were counted just like coins. Cowrie shells, obtained from some islands in the Indian Ocean, were a very widely used primitive form of money - in fact they were still in use in some parts of the world within living memory. "So important a role did the cowrie play as money in ancient China that its pictograph was adopted in their written language for 'money'." Thus it is not surprising that among the earliest countable metallic money or "coins" were "cowries" made of bronze or copper, in China.

In addition to these metal "cowries" the Chinese also produced "coins" in the form of other objects that had long been accepted in their society as money e.g. spades, hoes, and knives. Although there is some dispute over exactly when these developments first took place, the Chinese tool currencies were in general use at about the same time as the earliest European coins and there have been claims that their origins may have been much earlier, possibly as early as the end of the second millennium BC. The use of tool coins developed in the West. The ancient Greeks used iron nails as coins, while Julius Caesar regarded the fact that the ancient Britons used sword blades as coins as a sign of their backwardness.

These quasi-coins were all easy to counterfeit and, being made of base metals, of low intrinsic worth and thus not convenient for expensive purchases. True coinage developed in Asia Minor as a result of the practice of the Lydians, of stamping small round pieces of precious metals as a guarantee of their purity.