Ancient Greek Drachma

The ancient Greek drachma, also called the drachm, was the standard silver coin and basic unit of account of the Greek world from the 6th century BCE. It was divided into six obols, and in the Greek reckoning 100 drachmas made a mina and 6,000 a talent. Hundreds of Greek cities and kingdoms struck drachms on several different weight standards; the silver coinage of Athens, with its owl design, is the best-known example.

The name means a handful and is traditionally explained as the quantity of six iron spits, or obols, that could be grasped in one hand. The modern Greek drachma introduced in 1832 revived the name and remained Greece's currency until the euro replaced it.

Coinage began in western Asia Minor, where the kingdom of Lydia and neighbouring Ionian cities struck electrum coins such as the Lydian stater from the late 7th century BCE. Greek cities on the mainland and in the islands adopted the idea during the 6th century BCE, usually in silver. Aegina, with its turtle coins, was among the earliest and most important mints. Ancient tradition credits the Athenian reformer Solon with changes to weights and measures in the early 6th century BCE, but most numismatists date the first Athenian coins, the so-called heraldic types, to the mid-6th century BCE, after his time.

A drachm was a weight of silver as well as a coin, and its weight differed between regions. The main standards are summarised below; the weights are approximate averages from surviving coins.

Greek states usually struck larger multiples alongside the drachm. At Athens the main coin was the tetradrachm of four drachms, about 17.2 g, with didrachms, drachms and obol fractions for smaller payments.

From around the last quarter of the 6th century BCE Athens struck tetradrachms showing the head of Athena on the obverse and her owl, an olive sprig and the letters ΑΘΕ on the reverse. Silver from the mines at Laurion in Attica allowed very large issues, especially after a rich vein was found in the 480s BCE, which the Athenians used to build a fleet. During the 5th century BCE the owls became one of the most widely trusted coins in the eastern Mediterranean and were copied in Egypt, the Levant and Arabia. The design was kept deliberately conservative, a sign that recognisability supported acceptance as a medium of exchange.

Late 5th-century building accounts suggest that a skilled worker at Athens earned around one drachma a day, a useful guide to the coin's everyday value.

Philip II of Macedon and Alexander the Great struck on the Attic standard, and Alexander's silver tetradrachms, alongside the gold Macedonian stater, spread the Attic drachm across his empire. The successor kingdoms continued the system, although the Ptolemaic kings of Egypt adopted a lighter standard and a closed currency zone. Under Rome, Greek cities and provinces in the east kept striking drachms and tetradrachms, and the Attic drachm was treated as roughly equivalent to the Roman denarius. The debased billon tetradrachms of Roman Alexandria were among the last regular issues, ending with Diocletian's currency reform in the 290s CE.

The drachm outlived Greek political independence by many centuries. The Parthian drachm and the Sasanian drachm continued the denomination in Iran, and the Arabic word dirham, used for the silver coin of the caliphates such as the Abbasid dirham, derives from it. The word survives in the names of modern currencies, including the dirhams of Morocco and the United Arab Emirates, as well as in the revived Greek drachma of 1832 to 2001.

• American Numismatic Society
• British Museum collection