Tyrian Shekel

The Tyrian shekel was a silver coin struck by the Phoenician city of Tyre, on the coast of present-day southern Lebanon, from 126/125 BCE until around the time of the Jewish revolt against Rome in 66 CE. A heavy piece of high-grade silver, it showed the head of the city god Melqart on one side and an eagle on the other, and it became one of the most trusted silver coins in the eastern Mediterranean.

The coin is best known for its religious role in Judaea. Jewish authorities required the annual Temple tax in Jerusalem to be paid in Tyrian silver, so the shekel and its half circulated far beyond Phoenicia and are among the coins most often linked with the New Testament.

Tyre had struck its own silver since the fifth century BCE, using the Phoenician weight standard rather than the Athenian one behind the Attic drachma. After Alexander the Great took the city in 332 BCE it minted royal coins for Macedonian and later Hellenistic kings, including Ptolemaic and Seleucid issues. When the weakening Seleucid state recognised Tyre's autonomy in 126/125 BCE, the city launched its own civic series, dated by a new local era.

The main denominations were the shekel, a tetradrachm of roughly 14 grams, and the half-shekel, a didrachm of about 7 grams. Small numbers of bronze coins served everyday change. The series ran for nearly two centuries with remarkably little change in design or fineness, which is unusual for ancient silver and part of the reason it was so widely trusted.

The obverse carries a laureate head of Melqart, the patron god of Tyre, shown in the style of the Greek hero Herakles. The reverse shows an eagle standing on the prow of a ship, with a palm branch beside it, a club, a date and mint marks. The Greek legend describes the issuer as Tyre, "holy and inviolable", a formula that stressed the city's sacred and autonomous status.

From the late first century BCE the coins become cruder in style and carry a monogram usually read as the letters KP or KAP. Some scholars have argued that these later pieces were struck in Jerusalem under licence so that the Temple had a steady supply; others see them simply as a later phase of the Tyre mint. The question remains open.

Every adult Jewish man was expected to pay half a shekel a year towards the upkeep of the Temple, an obligation rooted in the older weight-based biblical shekel. Rabbinic sources state that this payment had to be made in Tyrian silver. The likely reason was practical: the coin held a consistent weight and purity, whereas Roman and other local coins varied. The image of a pagan god does not seem to have outweighed that advantage.

Pilgrims arriving with Roman denarii or other coins therefore had to buy Tyrian silver from money-changers in the Temple precincts, who charged a small fee for the service. This early form of currency exchange is the background to the Gospel account of Jesus overturning the money-changers' tables. The "thirty pieces of silver" paid to Judas are often identified with Tyrian shekels, though the texts do not name the coin.

Because Tyre was a major port and centre of the purple-dye industry, its shekel moved freely along trade routes linking the Levant, Egypt, Cyprus and inland Syria. Large hoards of Tyrian silver, sometimes found together with coins of neighbouring Sidon, show that it acted as a regional reserve coin. Its stable silver content made it a reliable store of value at a time when other silver coins were being thinned.

Production of Tyrian shekels ceased around 65–66 CE. Not long afterwards, rebels in the First Jewish Revolt struck their own silver shekels in Jerusalem on a similar weight, partly to replace the Tyrian coin for religious payments. In the region as a whole, Roman provincial tetradrachms of Antioch and later debased issues took over, part of the broader story of currency debasement in the Roman world. The Tyrian shekel is still a prized collector's coin, and its name lives on in the modern Israeli new sheqel.

• British Museum – Collection online
• American Numismatic Society