That this grand attempt to inaugurate a universal currency failed to attain a lasting success is due, not so much to any inherent impracticability in a design which would have been at that time, in a far higher measure than in the present day, a real boon to mankind at large, and a material aid and advancement of future civilizing influences; but its failure was due to events which Croesus could not foresee, and which, could he have foreseen them, he would have been powerless to ward off.

The following Table may serve to exhibit to the reader the whole system of the Lydian currency as reformed by Croesus, with all its ingenious and elaborate combinations :

LYDIA. TIME OF CROESUS, B.c. 568–554.

:

The events which led to the downfall of Croesus from the height of his prosperity and power, and to the incorporation of his dominions, including the Greek coast towns, into the Empire of Cyrus, are too well known to need repetition here. This is commonly supposed to have occurred in the year B.c. 546, but the latest investigations point to the year 554 as the most probable date. But, however momentous the change from a political point of view, nevertheless it is almost certain that no immediate alteration in the coinage was attempted by the new rulers of Western Asia: for it must be remembered that the Persians, like the Medes and Babylonians, were at this time without a specific coinage of their own; the tradition which ascribes the origin of the daric to a King of Persia of the name of Darius, who is said to have been one of the predecessors of Cyrus, being unworthy of credit, as it rests only upon the statement of Harpocration.1

1

The electrum coinage of the Greek cities had already been superseded by the Imperial

8.7. Δαρεικός—οὐχ ὡς οἱ πλεῖστοι νομίζουσιν, ἀπὸ Δαρείου τοῦ Ξέρξου πατρός, ἀλλ ̓ ἀφ' ἑτέρου τινὸς παλαιοτέρου βασιλέως. As Harpocration was an Alexandrian Greek, who lived certainly not earlier than the second century A.D., no value whatever should be attached to a statement of this sort. The whole passage in which it occurs was copied at a later period by Suidas, and again inserted by Musurus in the Aldine edition of the Scholiasts ad Aristoph. Eccles., 602.

Perhaps Xenophon is responsible for the error of Harpocration; for in his Cyropædeia (v. 2, 7) he represents darics as in use in the time of Cyrus I.: ἐπειδὴ δὲ ἔνδον ἦσαν ἐκφέρων ὁ Γωβρύας φιάλας χρυσᾶς καὶ πρόχους καὶ κάλπιδας καὶ κόσμον παντοῖον καὶ δαρεικοὺς ἀμέτρους τινὰς καὶ πάντα καλὰ, καὶ τέλος τὴν θυγατέρα K.T.A. It is needless to say that this work of Xenophon's is a mere romance, and utterly without historical value.

currency of Lydia; and, in the times of distress and impoverishment which followed the Persian conquest, it is unreasonable to suppose that there could have been any revived mintage in these towns with the single exception of Samos, which, under the rule of Polycrates, still maintained its independence until B.C. 520.

Whether or not the Persian Governor of Sardes continued to issue the gold and silver money of Croesus during the reigns of Cyrus and Cambyses must remain, for the present, a matter for conjecture. It is possible, and even probable, if we may judge from the quantities of these coins which have escaped the Persian melting-pot, that no change was at first made in the arrangements of the Sardian mint, and that both gold and silver money was put into circulation from time to time as necessity required, the old dies being retained, as a matter of course; for it was not part of the policy of Cyrus to introduce uncalled-for changes in the internal government of the various conquered States which contributed to form the vast Empire of Persia. The blending of the motley throng into one homogeneous whole was reserved for the organizing spirit of Darius, the son of Hystaspes, in whose reign the famous Persian "Archers" first went forth into the world.

The first five years of the reign of Darius were occupied in the extinction of a series of formidable rebellions in various parts of his extensive dominions, and it was not till the year B.C. 516 that he found leisure to devote his mind to the civil organization of his Empire. The division of the whole into Satrapies, at first twenty in number, and the imposition upon each of these principalities of a fixed sum of money to be collected by the several Satraps, and to be paid by them into the royal treasury, was one of the methods which Darius adopted

for welding into one coherent State, the various Provinces which together constituted the Persian Empire. The assessment of this tribute led to the institution of an Imperial coinage, the first idea of which may have been suggested to Darius by the gold and silver money of Lydia still circulating in the western Satrapies since the time of Croesus. It is probable also that the manifest advantages of current money, guaranteed by the State, were beginning to be appreciated beyond the limits of Asia Minor, to which it had hitherto been confined; and the system of rapid communication, by means of post horses and couriers, between the most distant portions of the empire and the capital, would naturally tend in no small degree to facilitate the adoption of the Western habit of receiving and paying sums of gold and silver by tale, without having recourse to weights and scales, as had been hitherto the custom in the East. An Imperial coinage once decided upon, the first and most important consideration for the Great King was necessarily the standard which would be most easily understood by his subjects, and in the choice of this there could not have been room for much hesitation; for, with the exception of Syria, Phoenicia, and the Greek coast towns, where the so-called Græco-Asiatic or Phoenician standard prevailed, the Babylonian gold and silver talents were everywhere in use. Darius had therefore only to follow in the footsteps of Croesus, by whom the Babylonian standard had already been adopted.

Nevertheless the Persian Imperial coinage differed considerably from that of Lydia, and was as simple as the latter was complex. We have seen that in the Lydian coinage of Croesus there were no less than eight different denominations of gold money, each of which was regulated in such a manner as to pass readily at a fixed equivalent in the markets of the tributary Greek towns in exchange for the local electrum and silver money of the district, of whatever standard that might happen to be, as may be seen by referring to the table given above (p. 21). Darius could afford to cast all such considerations to the winds. The very extent of his enormous Empire rendered any attempt at following out the minute arrangements of the Lydian royal coinage impracticable. Simplicity therefore is the chief characteristic of the Persian Imperial currency as first determined by Darius. There was to be one denomination of gold and one of silver, the gold piece to be worth 20 pieces of silver. This result might doubtless have been arrived at without issuing a new coinage, by simply retaining the gold stater of Croesus of 126 grs., and the silver drachm or siglos of 84 grs., and allowing all the other denominations of the intricate Lydian system to fall into disuse : but the type of the Lydian coin, the Lion and the Bull, was hardly appropriate to the money of the Great King, and if, as may well have been the case, this type possessed any symbolic or religious signification, it would moreover have been repugnant to the prejudices of an earnest Zoroastrian like Darius. The image of the Great King himself was accordingly substituted for the Lion and Bull—this one type, which I shall describe more minutely later on, being adopted for the Royal coins of both metals.

Darius, although he selected the gold stater of Croesus of 126 grs., and his siglos of

84

grs., as the prototypes of the Persian currency, sought nevertheless to give his new money a prestige of its own, by making a small addition to the weight both of the gold and of the silver coin. These seem to have been fixed respectively at 130 and 86 grs. In this, perhaps, the normal weights of the Babylonian gold and silver talents may have been reverted to, which in their passage westwards and during the lapse of time may be supposed to have suffered some slight diminution.

The metal of the Persian money, especially of the gold coinage, was of remarkable purity, -the daric, according to an analysis furnished by Letronne (Considérations, p. 108), containing only 3 per cent. of alloy. The result was, that the Persian gold coinage immediately obtained a reputation which enabled it to supersede the gold money of all other states, and to maintain its position as the sole gold currency in the ancient world. As long as and wherever Persia was supreme, the coinage of gold remained a prerogative of the Great King.

Not so the silver currency: for the very fact of the siglos being the only Imperial silver piece is sufficient to prove that it could never have been intended to supersede the many smaller and larger denominations necessary for small traffic and retail trade actually current in many districts of the Empire. The silver coinage was not the sole prerogative of the Great King or even of the Satraps, but appears to have been issued by the Great King, by his Satraps, and by large numbers of subject or tributary towns, according to their various requirements. The coinage of the Persian Empire may be divided into four main categories:

I. THE ROYAL COINAGE.

II. THE PROVINCIAL COINS WITH ROYAL TYPES.

III. THE SATRAPAL COINAGE.

IV. THE LOCAL COINAGES OF THE TRIBUTARY STATES.

In the following pages I propose to consider the first two of the above classes only. A separate article in the Numismata Orientalia by Prof. Julius Euting, of Strassburg, is, I understand, to be devoted to the coins with Phoenician and Aramaic incriptions, among which those of the Satraps will be included. The local coinages of the Greek tributary cities, although these undoubtedly formed part of the Persian Empire, we may dismiss as beyond the scope of the Numismata Orientalia.

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