Persian Coinage and the Daric
A Greek orator in fourth-century Athens complains that the daric had become a byword for corruption in the city. Herodotus, writing a century earlier, reports that the Persian kings paid their soldiers in darics. The Greek word δαρεικός came to mean a bribe or a fortune, and the term passed into later Greek and into Latin. The Sasanian drachm, the silver successor of the Achaemenid siglos, was the principal silver currency of the late antique east, and its weight standard was adopted, in turn, by the Umayyad and Abbasid caliphs in their dirham. The Persian monetary tradition shaped the regional economy for two and a half millennia, and the study of it is a study of the financial foundations of Eurasian trade.
The English literature begins with George Hill’s Catalogue of the Greek Coins of Arabia, Mesopotamia and Persia (1922, with later additions), the relevant entries in the Encyclopaedia Iranica (especially the “Coinage” entry by C. M. Kraay and G. K. Jenkins), and the recent work of Farhad Assar, Lutz Ilisch, and Mostafa Moshtagh. The British Museum collection, the American Numismatic Society collection, and the National Museum of Iran are the major museum references. For the Islamic period, Michael Bates’s Islamic Coins (2012) and Luke Treadwell’s work on the Samanid and Buyid coinage are the standard. The publication of the Sasanian coinage by Michael Alram has transformed the field; the Sylloge Nummorum Sasanidarum project, with the Paris and Vienna volumes in print, is the modern reference corpus.
The origins of coinage
The use of coinage as a medium of exchange was a relatively late development in the ancient Near East, and the Persians, when they began to strike coins in the late sixth century BCE, were drawing on a tradition that had been developed in the Greek cities of Asia Minor, particularly Lydia. The Lydian kings, ruling from Sardis in the seventh and sixth centuries BCE, were the first to issue coins of a known weight and purity, struck from a natural gold-and-silver alloy called electrum. The Lydian coinage is the work of Alyattes (r. c. 619–560 BCE) and especially Croesus (r. c. 560–546 BCE), whose gold and silver coins became the model for the Greek cities of Ionia. The Greek cities of Ionia, and the Achaemenid Persian state after its conquest of Lydia in 546 BCE, quickly adopted and refined the practice.
Cyrus the Great, the founder of the Achaemenid Empire, did not issue a distinctive Persian coinage. The Lydian and Ionian Greek cities continued to strike their own coins, and the Persian court paid its expenses in bullion, in kind, or in the coinages of the conquered territories. It was only with Darius the Great, in the late sixth or early fifth century BCE, that a distinctive Persian imperial coinage was established.
The gold daric and the silver siglos
The principal Achaemenid coin was the daric, a gold coin of about 8.4 grams, struck in very pure gold (typically 95–98% pure). The coin bore, on the obverse, a figure of the Persian king in a half-kneeling position, holding a bow in his left hand and a spear or javelin in his right. The reverse was marked only with a series of irregular punch marks, an incidental consequence of the striking process. The silver siglos, issued concurrently with the daric, weighed about 5.4 grams and bore a similar, though less detailed, royal image. The two coins were struck on the Attic-Greek standard, derived from the practice of the Greek cities of Asia Minor.
The daric was, in the ancient world, a coin of extraordinary reputation. Herodotus reports that the Persian kings paid their soldiers in darics and that the coin was used for large transactions, gifts, and diplomatic payments. The Greek orator Aeschines, in the fourth century BCE, complained bitterly that the daric had become a byword for corruption in Athens, since the coin was so widely accepted that Athenian orators and politicians were tempted to take bribes in it. The daric was so valuable and so well known that it gave its name to a Greek proverb, δαρεικός, meaning a bribe or a fortune.
The image of the Persian king on the daric was, in its turn, a major element of Achaemenid imperial iconography. The half-kneeling archer, with the bow in his left hand, was a clear assertion of martial kingship, and the choice of the bow, a weapon of the Iranian steppe tradition, was a deliberate political statement. The same image, in slightly different form, appeared on the silver siglos and on the tribute tablets of the empire.
Mints and production
The daric and siglos were struck at a number of royal mints in the Persian heartland, including Sardis in Lydia, Susa in Elam, and possibly Babylon and Memphis. The minting process was tightly controlled, and the weight and purity of the coins were kept remarkably consistent across the empire. The use of punch marks on the reverse, which initially was a simple consequence of the striking process, became a distinctive feature of the Achaemenid coinage and was used as a security measure to discourage counterfeiting.
The total volume of Achaemenid gold coinage was substantial. Estimates by numismatists suggest that the empire struck perhaps 20–30 million gold darics over the course of the dynasty, an enormous sum in the ancient world. Many of these coins have been found in hoards across the empire, from the Indus Valley to the Aegean, and they form a major category of the world’s surviving ancient coinage. The famous hoards of Sardis and Pasargadae, the Oxus Treasure (mostly Achaemenid and post-Achaemenid gold, now divided between the British Museum and the Victoria and Albert Museum), and the large hoards in the Black Sea region all attest to the volume of Achaemenid coinage. The 2007 archaeological discovery of a hoard of about 360 darics at Kala-i Kuhna in Afghanistan is one of the more recent examples.
Parthian coinage
The Parthian Empire, which succeeded the Achaemenids in Iran, developed a distinctive coinage that drew on both the Achaemenid and the Greek traditions. The principal Parthian coin was the silver drachm, a Greek-style coin bearing the portrait of the king on the obverse and an archer seated on a throne or on horseback on the reverse. The drachm was struck on the Attic standard and weighed about 4 grams.
The Parthian drachm is, in form, a Greek coin. The portrait of the king, often with a distinctive Parthian tiara, follows Greek conventions, and the reverse type of the seated archer was a Greek invention. The use of Greek on the obverse inscription, in the form of the king’s name and a few Greek words, is striking: the Parthian kings, ruling an empire that was largely Iranian in language and culture, chose to advertise themselves in Greek, the commercial language of the Hellenistic world.
The Parthian drachm circulated widely across the empire and beyond. Hoards of Parthian drachms have been found in Mesopotamia, the Iranian plateau, Central Asia, and the Caucasus, and the coin was the principal silver currency of the east in the centuries between the fall of the Achaemenids and the rise of the Sasanians. The Parthian gold stater was also struck, in smaller quantities, and was used for large transactions and diplomatic gifts. The Seleucid coinage that preceded the Parthian, struck by Alexander’s successors in the eastern satrapies, is a separate tradition, but the Parthians built on it.
Sasanian coinage
The Sasanian coinage, introduced by Ardashir I in the early third century CE, was one of the great coinages of late antiquity. The principal coin was the silver drachm, a coin of about 4 grams struck in very pure silver, bearing the portrait of the king on the obverse and a fire altar flanked by two attendants on the reverse. The drachm was issued in enormous quantities and was the principal silver currency of the late antique east, circulating from the Mediterranean to Central Asia and from the Caucasus to the Indian Ocean.
The image of the Sasanian king on the drachm is, like the Achaemenid daric, a major element of imperial iconography. The early Sasanian kings are shown with a distinctive globular crown, a heavy beard, and a jewelled diadem. The portrait becomes increasingly stylised and formal over the centuries, with the later Sasanian kings depicted in a sharp, almost iconic manner that anticipates the conventions of Byzantine and early Islamic coinage.
The fire altar on the reverse, with its two attendant figures, is a clear statement of Zoroastrian identity. The fire altar, with its three steps and its flames, is the central symbol of the Zoroastrian cult, and its appearance on the coinage made the drachm a de facto profession of the Zoroastrian faith. The Sasanian kings, who were devout Zoroastrians, used the coinage as a vehicle for religious as well as political identity.
Mints and production
The Sasanian drachm was struck at a large number of royal mints, including Ctesiphon, Rayy, Isfahan, Hamadan, Bishapur, Merv, Herat, and many others. Each mint was identified by an abbreviation on the reverse of the coin, and the dating was given in regnal years. The mint system was highly organised, and the output of the mints was substantial: estimates suggest that the Sasanian state struck perhaps 100–200 million silver drachms over the course of the dynasty, an enormous sum in the ancient world.
The Sasanian gold dinar, struck in smaller quantities, was a coin of about 7 grams in very pure gold. The dinar bore a similar design to the drachm and was used for large transactions, diplomatic gifts, and the payment of foreign mercenaries. The Sasanian copper and bronze follis was struck for local use, in denominations of 20, 40, and 60 to the drachm, and circulated in the cities and villages of the empire.
The Islamic period: the dirham and the dinar
The Arab conquest of the Sasanian Empire in 651 CE did not immediately bring the Islamic coinage to Iran. The early Arab caliphs, ruling from Damascus, maintained the existing Byzantine and Sasanian coinages for some time, and it was only under the Umayyad caliph ʿAbd al-Malik ibn Marwan, in the late seventh century, that a distinctively Islamic coinage was introduced. The new Islamic dinar, a gold coin of about 4.25 grams, and the dirham, a silver coin of about 2.7 grams, were explicitly modelled on the Sasanian and Byzantine models, but with the addition of Qur’anic inscriptions and the deliberate omission of figural images.
The Islamic dirham was, in turn, the ancestor of the medieval silver coinage of the Islamic world, including the dinar of the Iranian and Central Asian dynasties. The Persian tradition of high-quality silver coinage continued under the Samanids, the Buyids, the Ghaznavids, the Seljuks, the Ilkhanids, the Timurids, and the Safavids, each of whom issued coinage in silver, gold, and copper, with their own distinctive designs and inscriptions. The Qajar and Pahlavi dynasties of the modern period continued the tradition, and the contemporary Iranian rial carries, in its weight and design, the memory of two thousand years of Persian monetary history.
The monetary influence of the Persian world
The Persian monetary tradition had a profound influence on the development of coinage in the wider world. The Achaemenid daric, with its consistent weight and high purity, was admired and imitated by the Hellenistic kings, the Romans, and the Byzantines. The Sasanian drachm was the principal silver coin of the late antique east, and its weight standard was adopted by the Umayyad and Abbasid caliphs in their dirham. The Islamic dinar and dirham, in turn, became the model for the coinage of the medieval Islamic world, of the Crusader states, of the Indian Sultanates, and of the Ottoman Empire.
The Persian monetary tradition was not only a matter of weight and purity but also of design. The image of the king on the obverse, the religious or dynastic symbol on the reverse, and the use of a bilingual or trilingual legend were conventions that were widely imitated across the ancient and medieval world. The use of the ruler’s portrait on coins, a practice that was for a long time controversial in the Islamic world, has its remote origins in the Achaemenid daric and its more proximate origin in the Sasanian drachm.
The Achaemenid weight standard in detail
The Achaemenid weight standard, the basis of the daric and the siglos, was derived from the Lydian and Ionian Greek practice, not from the Lydian gold stater as one sometimes sees claimed (the heavy Lydian gold stater was about 14.1 grams, the light stater about 4.7 grams; neither matches the daric’s 8.4 grams). The most plausible predecessor is the Athenian gold stater at about 8.6 grams, on which the daric is closely modelled. The Achaemenid silver siglos, at about 5.4 grams, was struck on the same weight standard as the Athenian tetradrachm, and the two were interconvertible at a fixed ratio.
The choice of the Attic-Greek weight standard was a deliberate policy decision by Darius the Great. The Greek cities of Asia Minor, which had been using the Attic standard for centuries, would find it easy to accept the new Persian coin. The satrapies of the eastern empire, in particular the Indus Valley, had their own weight standards, and the Achaemenid administration had to convert between the various local standards. The use of the Attic-Greek standard as the imperial standard was a major simplification, and it helped to integrate the economy of the Achaemenid empire.
The Sasanian drachm, at about 4 grams, was a local Iranian standard, derived from the late Achaemenid and Parthian coinage of the same weight, not directly from the Roman denarius (3.4 grams). The drachm continued in use through the Sasanian period and was the principal silver coin of the late antique east, with the Sasanian weight standard adopted, in turn, by the Umayyad and Abbasid caliphs in their dirham.
For further reading
- Hill, George. Catalogue of the Greek Coins of Arabia, Mesopotamia and Persia (1922, with later additions).
- Kraay, C. M., and G. K. Jenkins. The “Coinage” entry in Encyclopaedia Iranica.
- Assar, Farhad. The recent articles in the Journal of the Oriental Numismatic Society and the Numismatic Chronicle.
- Bates, Michael. Islamic Coins (2012).
- Alram, Michael. Sylloge Nummorum Sasanidarum: Paris – Berlin – Wien (in progress, 2004–).
- Bivar, A. D. H. “The Political History of Iran under the Arsacids” in The Cambridge History of Iran III.2.
- Frye, Richard N. The Heritage of Persia (1962).
- Curtis, John. “The Achaemenid Empire” in The Oxford Handbook of Ancient Iran (2013).
- Treadwell, Luke. Buyid Coinage: A Die Corpus (2001, with the Samanid companion in preparation).