Today, we're talking about Middle Eastern empires and their coins. At the top we have an example from the Achaemenid Persian Empire, which lasted from 550-330 BCE. These are the Persians who fought the Greeks, were conquered by Alexander the Great, and depicted very inaccurately and racistly in 300. This empire only had two denominations: a gold coin called a Daric and a silver coin called the Siglos, an example of which probably dating from 420-375 BCE¹ is the top coin in my photos. These coins have a small diameter, but are really thick. This one is easily the heaviest coin in the picture, and they tend to average just over five and a half grams in weight. For comparison, a contemporary drachma from Athens would weigh 4.3g, and a US quarter weighs 5.67g.

While we don't have any price lists from this empire to my knowledge, at the time in Athens, a skilled laborer could earn one drachma a day, and each one of these coins contains over 25% more silver than that. And as I said earlier, this was the smallest denomination of coinage the empire minted. So you might be wondering how that would work. Like isn't that like if you had to use cash, but the only money available to anyone was in the form of $100 and $1000 bills? The answer to that is that the vast majority of economic exchanges at the time didn't involve coins or formalized money at all. In the Mediterranean world, coinage was largely a Greek phenomenon. The Lydians invented it, but the Greeks just went apeshit for it for whatever reason and spread it to everyone else. Even with the Persians, while Darics were used for large exchanges all over the empire, you mostly find Sigloi in areas with ethnically Greek populations. The vast majority of the population did not use coins at all and may have gone their whole lives without seeing one.

The obverse of these coins always depicted the emperor, usually either kneeling or in a stylized run and holding a weapon of some sort. The one on mine is carrying a dagger. The reverse is incredibly plain, just a simple vaguely rectangular shape made by an undecorated reverse die. These plain reverses originated with archaic Greek coinage, and while the Greeks added increasingly complex patterns to these "incuse squares" that eventually evolved into regular coin reverses as we think of them now, the Persians seemed content with them as is. Also on this coin are several small marks made by punches after the coin was struck. These are called banker's marks, countermarks, or counterstamps. We don't have any sources talking about these, but it's usually thought that these were to communicate things like whether a given coin was accepted somewhere, that it was marked to be spent on a specific thing, that it was confirmed legitimate silver, that it should be treated as a certain value now that its traveled out of its intended range, and things like that. But there's really nothing stopping someone from making an after the fact mark on a coin for whatever the hell reason they wanted.

The Achaemenids fell to Alexander. Greek and Roman sources tell us about the amazing tactics Alexander used to defeat a much larger army than his own, while cuneiform sources tell us that there was an eclipse as the battle started, and since eclipses were considered the sign of the death of a king in their astrology, the Persian army panicked and abandoning the king, so Alexander just steamrolled the few soldiers left. Cuneiform sources also had to invent new vocabulary for the torture devices the Greeks started using on the locals post conquest.

Alexander's empire split apart after his death, and the Middle Eastern portion was ruled by a dynasty called the Seleucids. They were conquered piece by piece by the Parthians, who ruled the area from 247 BCE to 224 CE. Despite being around for over four centuries we don't really have good sources on them. There's no surviving historical literature from their perspective, so we get a lot of what we know from the Romans, who really just talked about them when they went to war, and the rest comes from coins and archaeology. By far the most common coins from this empire are these silver coins weighing around 4 grams, one of which is the second down in this picture. We don't really know what they called it, but their coinage system derives from the Greek one the Seleucids brought in, and this is basically their version of a drachma. But because coin collectors are weird, they use the old fashioned Anglicized form drachm (pronounced "drahm") to refer to these coins. Silver fractions of this coin exist, as do bronze units, but both are far less common than these, so it's likely that once again, the vast majority of small economic transactions in the empire were not based on coinage or formalized money.

Visually, the obverses of these drachms depicts the current Parthian emperor, usually bearded and usually in profile. The reverse is this standardized depiction of a seated archer surrounded by Greek text. As the empire progressed, the quality of that Greek got worse and worse, indicating that fewer and fewer Greek speakers were involved in the minting process. Early Parthian coins have portraiture quite similar to what you see on Helenistic Greek coins, but early in the first century CE, they started becoming more angular and stylized, possibly an intentional choice to distance themselves from the Classical cultures of Rome that they were more and more often getting into wars with.

The Romans seemed to learn how to reliably defeat the Parthians during the second century CE, invading multiple times and sometimes capturing significant territory. But things changed for the Romans when the Sasanian Empire (224-651 CE) rose to power. During the third century, Shapur I not only repeatedly defeated the Romans, but he killed one emperor, made another pay him tribute, and captured a third. As you might expect, a lot of our info on this empire derives from hostile Roman sources, but there's also a medieval Persian source called the Shahnameh that gives us a narrative for the empire, though it's a rather literary rather than historical one.

The most common coins are these broad, thin silver coins that are also generally called drachms. My two examples here are broken, something that can easily happen to coins this thin made out of a material that can get brittle over time.² The former depicts Varhran II (274-293 CE) and his family on the obverse, and the second depicts Khusru II (590-628 CE). The reverses of both depict a Zoroastrian fire alter and a pair of attendants, the standard reverse for basically the entire period. Once again smaller denominations exist, but they're far from common.

Khusru II is one of the most significant figures in the history of the Sasanians. He brought the empire to its greatest extent, taking Egypt, the Levant (including Jerusalem), some of Turkey, and besieging Constantinople, though not taking it. This of course was a terrible idea that spread the resources of the empire way too thin. The Byzantine emperor Heraclius reconquered Byzantine territory and made raids well into Persia, greatly weakening the Sasanian position, leading to the Arab conquest and the end of the empire.

1. Sigloi didn't have much variation in design, and wear can easily erase evidence of the signs that you use to identify these coins. In this case, if the emperor on this coin originally had three or four pellets vertically on his torso before wear, this coin actually dates from 375-336 BCE.

2. The thing with impure silver is that other metals in the alloy, like copper, can leach out over time. If this happens, it harms the structural integrity of the coin and can leave it brittle. Coins this has happened to are said to be "crystalized."

I feel like Roman coinage for the most part peaked in the first half of the third century AD. The sestertii in particular are just really nice, though financial conditions meant they often didn't make that many, as they were focusing on denarii to pay the troops, and inflation was shrinking the value and usefulness of this denomination. When I was still collecting, it was hard to get any of these sestertii that had much detail in my price range. But most ancient coin collectors have no tolerance for coins that are broken or incomplete in any way, so this sesterius of Philip I (reigned 244-249) stayed well within my budget. I should probably take a proper photo rather than just this image from a scanner at some point, but hopefully you can still see the style well enough. My guess is that this coin didn't actually break (it's a pretty thick piece of brass, so it's not easy to do) but instead the blank wasn't formed right, and this was a period where they really just needed pump all coins out fast, so this was considered acceptable enough to keep.

Note about ancient coin collecting in general: while there's a lot to love about the field, the sources for these coins are often much shadier than friendly store fronts make it appear, and the ancient coin market is the cause of a lot of archaeological damage. I stopped collecting years ago when I finally really started looking into the problems, and I'd recommend not supporting the market in general unless there's some major reforms in industry standards that I really don't see coming.

So the above post was my favorite coin that I own. For what I don't own, I actually like a lot of Parthian and Sasanian coins, though usually the ones I particularly like the style of were out of my price range. In particular, I always wanted a nice drachm of Shapur I (the Sasanian Shahansha who reigned over Persia and most of the Middle East from 240-270) like this one. These silver coins were broad and thin, so unlike they above, they are easy to break, so maybe if I kept on collecting, I would have eventually run into one with a little bit missing that'd have satisfied me enough.