or punched from a single master die, were sent from the court to each operating mint, had been adopted; he was reported to have had new dies made in the thirteenth and thirtieth years of his reign (Ṭabarī, I, pp. From about 29/650 to 50/670 all these issues continued to bear the name of a Sasanian emperor, usually Ḵosrow II, the last emperor to have struck coins in quantity, and abbreviated mint names in Pahlavi.
The Achaemenid rulers, for example, customarily had precious metals melted down and poured into jars; the molds were subsequently broken and the bullion stored. At first the satraps and city governors also minted coins in both gold and silver, some bearing Greek letters next to the Achaemenid archer on the obverse (Hill, pp. At any given time the number of mints in actual operation was smaller.
As a result, although tax levies were expressed in monetary units, actual payments were usually in kind (Dandamayev and Lukonin, p. Equally, at Darius’ palace at Persepolis the workmen were paid in kind: “Sheep and beer are the equivalent, one sheep for three shekels, one jug for one shekel” (Olmstead, p. Officials were also often paid with claims on the produce of land, rather than in currency (Dandamayev and Lukonin, pp. From a tablet found at Persepolis it is clear that already during the reign of Xerxes I (486-65 B. E.) one-third of the wages were accounted for “in cash” and toward the end of his reign two-thirds (Ghirshman, pp. After 55/675 most of the Persian coinage was struck in the territories subject to Baṣra, that is, eastern and southern Persia; indeed, more than half the total coinage was probably issued in Fārs, with Kermān and Sīstān accounting for much of the rest.
Coinage in ancient Persia thus weighed about a pound. by another series, which is beyond doubt Persian royal coinage, known to the Greeks as “Daric staters” (gold) and “Daric sigloi” (silver), both with the characteristic image of the archer on the obverse. 92), but production of the silver coins seems to have ceased in the early 4th century. The siglos weighed 11.2 g, and the silver content was more than 90 percent. The darics in particular served as the gold standard throughout the western part of the Persian empire and Asia Minor (Olmstead, p. 83), but another mint for gold was established some time in the 5th century, probably in Babylonia, and there may have been several mints for gold in the 4th century (Carradice, p. It has been suggested that a large proportion of Achaemenid currency was struck exclusively to pay for the military establishment, gold for the army, silver for the navy. E.) the Greek legends become so conventional as to be unintelligible (Sellwood, 1980, p. 331-32), and even at major mints coins were not necessarily struck every year (Göbl, 1971, p. Šāpūr II (307-79) transported minting equipment on his eastern campaigns; the court mint (heterogram BBA = “court”) is also thought to have remained ambulatory for some time (Göbl, 1971, p. Sasanian coins are often countermarked, probably by later Sogdian and Muslim rulers, certifying that they remained valid currency in regions under those rulers’ control (Göbl, 1971, p.
In western Asia the earliest coinage is believed to have been issued at Sardis in Lydia in the 6th century B. E.; the first examples were of electrum, a naturally occurring alloy of gold and silver. The purpose was apparently to provide a uniform standard of value throughout the empire and also, according to Herodotus (4.166), to demonstrate Darius’ own power, “to leave a memorial of himself, such as no king had ever left before . The Babylonian weight standard, which was already in use on the Persian plateau, was adopted in general outline (Mitchiner, 1973, p. confirms that merchants paid “according to the stone (weight) of the king”: 1 (Olmstead, p. Twenty sigloi were equivalent to 1 daric; the ratio of value between silver and gold was thus theoretically 13.3:1. This curious division may have reflected the fact that silver was the common currency in the Mediterranean, whereas the army operated mainly in west