Parthian Drachm

The Parthian drachm was the standard silver coin of the Arsacid dynasty, which ruled the Parthian Empire across Iran and Mesopotamia from the mid-3rd century BCE until 224 CE. Struck at many mints on a weight inherited from Greek practice, it was the everyday high-value coin of the empire for more than four centuries and is one of the most plentiful silver issues of the ancient Near East.

The Parthians issued silver and bronze but no regular gold. Alongside the drachm they struck a larger silver tetradrachm, worth four drachms, chiefly at Seleucia on the Tigris. The drachm was succeeded by the Sassanid drachma, which kept its basic form.

Parthia began as a north-eastern province of the Seleucid kingdom. When the Parni, a nomadic people led by Arsaces I, took the region in the mid-3rd century BCE, they found a monetary system already built on the Greek Attic drachma. The earliest Arsacid coins copied that model: a ruler's head on the obverse and Greek lettering on the reverse. The new state took over existing Seleucid coinage practice rather than inventing a new one, which made its money easy to accept in markets used to Greek coins.

Large-scale minting followed the conquests of Mithridates I in the 2nd century BCE, which brought Media and Babylonia, with their established mints and trading cities, under Parthian rule.

The standard drachm shows the king's bust, usually facing left, wearing a diadem or, from the 1st century BCE onward, a tall decorated tiara. The reverse carries the image that defines the series: a seated archer holding a bow, generally identified with the dynasty's founder, Arsaces. Every king used the dynastic name Arsaces in the coin legend, so rulers are identified by portrait, epithets and style rather than by personal name.

Legends were written in Greek, often in a square arrangement of titles such as "king of kings" and "philhellene". Over time the Greek became stylised and in places unreadable, and from the reign of Vologases I in the 1st century CE letters in the Parthian script began to appear. Small monograms on the reverse are taken by specialists to identify the mint, among them Ecbatana, Rhagae and Mithradatkart.

The drachm weighed roughly 4 grams of good silver for much of the dynasty's history, close to the Attic norm. The tetradrachm, struck mostly at Seleucia, served larger payments in Mesopotamia. Copper and bronze coins of several sizes handled small change locally.

The tetradrachm suffered marked currency debasement in the 1st and 2nd centuries CE, ending as a coin of low-grade billon. The drachm kept its silver content better, although its style coarsened. The weakening of the coinage is often linked by historians to costly wars with Rome and to internal struggles between rival claimants to the throne.

Parthia sat across the overland routes linking the Mediterranean with Central Asia and China, and its coins served merchants who moved silk, spices and other goods through Mesopotamia and Iran. Parthian drachms circulated alongside Roman silver such as the denarius in frontier zones, and Parthian monetary influence is visible in the coinage of smaller states within its orbit, including Characene at the head of the Persian Gulf. To the east, the coinage of the Indo-Scythians and the Indo-Parthian rulers shows a comparable mixing of Greek models with local traditions.

Because so many kings shared one name, the coins have been central to modern efforts to reconstruct the Arsacid royal sequence. The standard typology used by collectors and museums is the one devised by the numismatist David Sellwood.

The dynasty fell when Ardashir I, a ruler from Persis, defeated the last Arsacid king, Artabanus IV, in 224 CE. The Sasanians kept the silver drachm as their main coin, but replaced the archer with a fire altar and moved the legends fully into Middle Persian. In that sense the Parthian drachm stands in a direct line from Greek currency of the Hellenistic era to the Sasanian silver that later shaped early Islamic dirhams such as the Abbasid dirham. For the general role of minted metal in ancient economies, see money.

• Encyclopaedia Britannica: Parthia
• British Museum
• American Numismatic Society