The history of mints correlates closely with the history of coins. In the beginning, hammered coinage or cast coinage were the chief means of coin minting, with resulting production runs numbering as little as the hundreds or thousands.
The first mint was likely established in Lydia in the 7th century BC, for coining gold, silver and electrum. The Lydian innovation of manufacturing coins under the authority of the state spread to neighboring Greece, where a number of city-states operated their own mints. Some of the earliest Greek mints were within city-states on Greek islands such as Crete; a mint existed at the ancient city of Cydonia on Crete at least as early as the fifth century BC.