Just looked through the dozen coins sitting on my desk because of this thread. Three were struck before I was born. That's pretty cool.

At the Chicago Art Institute, there was a collection of coins dating back thousands of years. Each coin had a good paragraph or two next to it. We don't really think much of coins and the people on them nowadays, but back then, the style in which the person was depicted, the symbolism on the reverse, etc-- these things were displays of power, effective propaganda, and so on.