Toman

The toman is a Persian money unit equal to ten thousand dinars, used in Iran since at least the Safavid era and still the unit in which most Iranians quote prices today. Its name comes from a Mongol and Turkic word for "ten thousand", which also described a military division of that size.

For most of its history the toman was a unit of account for large sums rather than a coin in daily use, although gold tomans were struck under the Qajar dynasty. Since the Iranian rial became the official currency in 1932, one toman has been understood as ten rials.

The word reached Iran through the Mongol conquest of the thirteenth century and the Ilkhanid state that followed. In Mongol and Turkic usage a tümen was a unit of ten thousand, applied both to soldiers and to sums of money. In Iranian accounting the dinar, a name that went back to early Islamic gold coins such as the Umayyad dinar, had by then become a tiny money of account, and a toman of ten thousand dinars provided a convenient unit for large payments, taxes and state budgets.

Under the Safavid dynasty, which ruled from 1501, the toman was the standard unit for expressing large values. The main silver coin from the reign of Shah Abbas I was the abbasi, and accounts commonly reckoned one toman as 50 abbasis, or 10,000 dinars. Smaller coins such as the shahi were fractions of the abbasi. Merchants, chroniclers and European travellers recorded revenues, salaries and prices in tomans, which makes the unit important for economic historians of early modern Iran.

The Qajar rulers of the nineteenth century continued the system. Gold coins denominated in tomans were struck, and a new silver unit, the qiran, was introduced in the earlier part of the century, valued at one-tenth of a toman. Repeated reductions in the weight and fineness of coins, a form of currency debasement, and the falling value of silver on world markets weakened Persian money in the late nineteenth century. Banknotes denominated in tomans were issued by the Imperial Bank of Persia, a British-owned institution, from the 1890s.

In 1932 Iran replaced the qiran with the rial at par, and the rial was divided into 100 dinars of a new, larger value. The name rial itself is thought to derive from the Spanish real, a coin long familiar in Middle Eastern trade, and is shared with the Omani rial and the Yemeni rial. Under the new system the toman ceased to be an official unit but was kept as a popular name for ten rials. Iran's central bank, Bank Markazi, established in 1960, issues paper money denominated in rials only.

Most Iranians still think and bargain in tomans. Shop prices, rents and salaries are commonly quoted in tomans, while banknotes, bank statements and official documents show rials, so a price of 100,000 tomans corresponds to 1,000,000 rials. Visitors are often confused by the gap between spoken and printed amounts.

Decades of high inflation and a falling exchange rate against foreign currencies have made rial figures very long. Iranian authorities have repeatedly approved plans to remove four zeros and make a new toman, worth 10,000 current rials, the official unit, with a transition period during which old and new notes would circulate together. Implementation has been slow, and the arrangement in which the official rial and the popular toman coexist has persisted.

• Central Bank of the Islamic Republic of Iran
• British Museum collection
• American Numismatic Society