Achaemenid Coinage

Achaemenid coinage was the money issued in the Persian Achaemenid Empire, which ruled from the Aegean to the Indus between the mid-6th century BCE and Alexander the Great's conquest in the 330s BCE. Its royal coins were the gold daric and the silver siglos, introduced under Darius I and showing the Persian king as an archer. Alongside them, satraps (provincial governors), local dynasts and subject cities struck a wide range of coins of their own.

Royal coinage was struck and used mainly in western Asia Minor, the region the Persians inherited from the kingdom of Lydia. In the imperial heartland, payments were long made in weighed silver rather than coin.

When Cyrus the Great conquered Lydia around 547 BCE, the Persians took over one of the first coin-using states in the world. The Lydian kings had struck electrum and then separate gold and silver coins, the latter usually called Croeseids after King Croesus; see Lydian stater. Coins of the Croeseid lion-and-bull type appear to have continued for some time under Persian rule, at Sardis.

Under Darius I (522–486 BCE) the Persians introduced coins of their own design, probably towards the end of the 6th century BCE. A seal impression on a tablet from Persepolis dated to 500 BCE uses a siglos type, giving a firm terminal date. The gold daric weighed about 8.4 g of nearly pure gold; the silver siglos weighed around 5.4–5.6 g. Twenty sigloi were reckoned equal to one daric, implying a gold-to-silver ratio of about 13 to 1, an early example of a managed bimetallic relationship.

The Greeks connected the daric's name with Darius, although some scholars derive it from an Old Persian word for gold. The name siglos is the Greek form of the Semitic shekel. Larger sums were counted in the mina and talent; Herodotus records the tribute of the satrapies in talents of silver.

Both coins show a crowned figure, generally taken to be the king or an idealised royal hero, with bow and quiver. Numismatists distinguish four main types: a half-length figure shooting an arrow, used only on early sigloi; a kneeling or running figure drawing a bow; one holding a spear and bow; and one holding a dagger and bow. The reverse is a plain oblong incuse punch. The design changed little over nearly two centuries, so close dating of individual coins is difficult.

Darics travelled widely in the Greek world, where they were used to pay mercenaries and to fund Persia's diplomacy among the Greek cities. Plutarch relates that the Spartan king Agesilaus said he had been driven out of Asia by thousands of "archers", meaning darics paid to his enemies.

Silver for daily trade and military pay in the western provinces came largely from local mints. Phoenician cities struck their own series, described under Sidonian coinage and Byblos coinage, and Lycian, Carian and Cilician dynasts issued coins on Greek weight standards. Some satraps, among them Tissaphernes and Pharnabazus in the late 5th and 4th centuries BCE, struck coins with realistic portraits, mostly to pay for campaigns. In the 4th century Mazaios, satrap in Cilicia, struck silver at Tarsus and later continued as governor of Babylon under Alexander. Many of these issues followed Greek drachma denominations rather than the royal siglos.

At the empire's eastern edge, Gandhara was a Persian satrapy, and the bent bars and early punch-marked silver of north-west India, ancestors of the karshapana, appeared during or soon after Persian rule.

Alexander's conquest ended royal Persian coinage. Huge reserves of Persian bullion were coined into his own silver and gold, such as the Macedonian stater, and his Seleucid successors established Greek-style money across the former empire. The daric's reputation for purity lasted, and later Iranian dynasties, including the issuers of the Sasanian drachm, made coinage central to royal image-making in a way the Achaemenids had begun.

• British Museum – Collection online
• American Numismatic Society
• Encyclopaedia Britannica – Daric