The Daric (and the Siglos)

The daric and the siglos were a matched pair, gold and silver, aimed at different users and different regions. The Encyclopaedia Iranica article on the daric, by Michael Alram, sets the frame: the daric is the "Achaemenid gold coin of ca. 8.4 gr, which was introduced by Darius I (522–486 B.C.E.) toward the end of the 6th century B.C.E.", and the daric and the siglos together "represented the bimetallic monetary standard that the Achaemenids developed from that of the Lydians".^[1] The gold was very nearly pure, and the purity was the point. Herodotus, who knew the coin, says as much of its maker:

Dareios refined gold and made it as pure as possible, and of this caused coins to be struck.

Herodotus 4.166, trans. Macaulay^[2]

Amélie Kuhrt's characterisation in her sourcebook is the modern echo: the daric "was prized for its high gold content, guaranteed by the royal figure stamped on one side".^[3] Both coins bore that figure, a crowned archer, on the face; the back carried only the rough oblong dent of the punch that held the blank against the die. There was no legend, no name, no date, and the design barely changed in two centuries, which is why the coinage is at once instantly recognisable and notoriously hard to arrange in time.^[4]

The royal coinage was never a currency for the whole empire, and was never meant to be. As the 2021 Companion's coinage chapter puts it, the Achaemenids were "never at pains to establish darics and sigloi as the single valid currency in their empire": satraps and officials struck their own series, subject dynasts and cities minted freely, and foreign silver, above all the Athenian tetradrachm, circulated deep inside Persian territory.^[5] The daric was one coinage among many in a deliberately plural monetary world.

Coined money was not a Persian invention, and the Persian coinage did not begin in Persia. It began at Sardis, where the Lydian kings had struck electrum, a gold-and-silver alloy, since roughly the mid seventh century; the difficulty that electrum's gold content could be manipulated was solved by Croesus, who replaced it with the first true bimetallic coinage, pure gold and pure silver of the lion-and-bull type the Greeks called Kroiseioi, croeseids.^[5] For a long time scholars doubted whether any croeseid could really be placed in Croesus's own reign, and a minority argued that the whole series was Persian; excavated lion-and-bull coins from a pre-destruction level at Sardis have now substantiated the old view that Croesus himself introduced them.^[5]

When Cyrus took Sardis in the 540s BCE he kept the mint running, striking croeseids of the same types for some three decades more. The choice was sensible on every count: Lydia was a monetised society and its money worked; the new rulers of a coinless Iran had no coinage tradition of their own to impose; and continuity in the money reassured the conquered.^[5] Numismatists divide the croeseids into an 'early' and a 'late' group, distinct in style and weight, and the two are never found hoarded together, which suggests a real gap in production; Ian Carradice, whose 1987 hoard study underpins the modern chronology, would place that gap in the late sixth century, around 520 to 505.^[6] The 'late' croeseids, on the current consensus, are Persian issues, the coinage of Cyrus, Cambyses and the young Darius striking a dead king's types, and it was these that Darius's archer replaced.

When exactly the archer coinage began is the sharpest technical argument the daric has generated, and it turned for fifty years on a single find. The foundation deposits of Darius's Apadana at Persepolis, excavated in 1933, contained gold croeseids and Greek silver beneath the inscribed plaques of DPh, but not one daric or siglos.^[7] The inference long seemed irresistible: had Darius's own coinage existed when the deposit was laid, his own coins would surely have gone into his own building. Since the DPh text names conquests that point to a composition between about 519 and 511, the archer coinage was held to begin after that window; A. D. H. Bivar's Cambridge History chapter states the classic position, that the coinage of Darius "had not been inaugurated at the moment of the deposit", with the first typically Persian issues at Sardis beginning, on Robinson's dating, about 515.^[8] Carradice, arguing from the Greek coins in the deposit itself, pushed the deposition down toward 500 or even 490 and the coinage's start "very early in the fifth century"; Michael Vickers pressed further still, toward the reign of Xerxes.^[6]

Two moves resolved the question, both from Persepolis clay. First, in 1988 Margaret Cool Root published a Fortification tablet, PF 1495, recording a Persian official named Miššabada moving tribute toward Susa; in place of a seal he had twice impressed the reverse of the document with a Type II archer coin. The text is dated to the twenty-second regnal year of Darius, that is 500/499 BCE. As Root put it, "This demonstrates that by 500 B. C. at the very latest the Type II Archer had been minted and put into circulation."^[9][10] The late datings collapsed at a stroke. Second, Root dismantled the logic of the deposit itself. A foundation deposit is not a hoard, a random sample of the money in circulation; it is a composed statement. "The absence of Archer coins under the Apadana does not necessarily mean that they did not exist. It only necessarily means that they were not deposited under this building."^[9] On her reading "the very nature of this rhetorical construct is likely to have dictated the deliberate exclusion of Persian Archer coins": the deposit's coins stand for the conquered periphery, gold of the world's four corners pressed beneath the king's hall, and Persian coins had no place in a statement about the non-Persian world.^[9] Cindy Nimchuk has developed the same insight, observing that each of the four regions DPh names as the empire's corners was associated with gold, so that the deposited coins make the claim of the text tangible in metal.^[7] The deposit, in short, dates nothing about the daric; the tablet does. The balance of the field now puts the first archer coins in the closing years of the sixth century, with Darius their author, exactly as Herodotus implies.^[5] Only a die-study of the early issues, or another sealed and dated impression, is likely to narrow it further.

The typology within which all of this is argued goes back to E. S. G. Robinson, who in 1958 used the evidence of newly found hoards to overturn the older arrangements of Babelon and Hill and set the sequence still in use.^[11] Type I, known only on sigloi and sparsely, shows the archer as a half-figure from the waist up, crowned and robed, a bow in the left hand and two arrows in the right. Type II, in silver and more rarely gold, shows the full figure kneeling, drawing his bow to shoot, a quiver at his back. Type III sets the figure in the Knielauf, the kneeling-running pose, bow thrust forward and a transverse spear in the right hand; Type IV replaces the spear with a short dagger. The reverse of every issue, in Carradice's words, is "a single oblong incuse with irregular ground".^[6] Types I and II and the first variety of III belong to Darius's reign, in parallel or rapid succession: reverse die-links are common within, though never between, these early types, and so few dies are known that their production must have been brief and small. The later varieties of Type III, and Type IV, minted in far greater quantity, ran from about Xerxes's time to the end of the empire.^[6][5]

Whom the archer represents was long debated. Older scholarship, struck by the resemblance of the Type I half-figure to the Assyrian god in the winged disc, argued that the coin showed a deity, perhaps Ahura Mazdā; the identity of the half-figure in the winged symbol is itself contested.^[12] The debate has settled. The numismatic evidence, as Alram puts it, "does not permit identification of the image on the darics and sigloi as anything but that of the emperor; it was adopted by Darius as a dynamic expression of his royal power expressly for his coin issues", and the Companion confirms that "the archer is generally accepted as representing the notion of the king and kingship in Achaemenid Iran".^[1][5] Not a portrait: like every Achaemenid image of the king, the figure is generic and timeless, the office rather than the man, which is why no daric can be assigned to a ruler by his face. Yet the point stands, and Root insisted on it, that the placing of the royal person on coinage at all was an Achaemenid innovation, ahead of anything Greek.^[9]

The image's sources have been traced with some precision. Mark Garrison's work on the thousands of seal impressions in the Fortification archive shows the crowned, robed hero-archer being worked out in the seal workshops of the Persepolis region in the late sixth century, exactly when the coin types were designed; the Type II archer looks like such a glyptic hunter lifted out of his narrative scene and set alone in the round frame of the coin, the king as royal hunter and hero.^[9][5] Root reads the half-length Type I against the king seen in state, in his chariot, visible from the waist up in elevated majesty, and against the numinous half-figures of the winged emblems; she declines the assumption that the 'simpler' half-figure must be the earlier design.^[9] The running types add motion, in the Companion's phrase "visualizing the king's power converted into speed"; whether the Knielauf also deliberately echoed the shooting Herakles of Greek art, an image calculated, as Root suggested, to marry "the idea of the Persian king as primaeval royal hunter with the idea of the Persian king as archetypal western hero" for the western markets the coins served, is attractive but unprovable.^[5][9]

What is certain is that the bow was the king's own chosen sign. On his tomb Darius declares, "As a bowman I am a good bowman both afoot and on horseback."^[13] The companion inscription makes the weapon the measure of empire: look at the throne-bearers, "then shall it become known to thee: the spear of a Persian man has gone forth far".^[14] The coin compressed that whole ideology into eight grams of gold. And it travelled where the reliefs could not: as Alram notes, "in addition to their mercantile value, the darics thus had a propaganda function", the king's armed image passing from hand to hand in markets he would never see.^[1]

The Greeks believed the dareikos was named for Darius, and the grammarian Pollux says so outright. Modern philology long preferred a different story. Ernst Herzfeld proposed in 1938 that the word went back to an Old Persian *dari- 'golden', so that the coin was 'the golden one' and the link to Darius a later folk-etymology; Alram's Iranica article reports the position as the prevailing one, that "modern scholars have generally supposed that the Greek term dareikós can be traced back to Old Persian *dari- 'golden' and that it was first associated with the name of Darius only in later folk etymology", and Le Rider and Brust have restated the case since.^[1] Dandamaev and Lukonin likewise dismissed Pollux and derived the name from the Old Persian word for gold.^[15]

The numismatists have never been persuaded, and the pendulum has lately swung back. Carradice's judgement in 1987 was blunt: "It is now generally accepted that the word daric derives from the name of Darius I, as Pollux explicitly states."^[6] The Companion's 2021 chapter sides with him, finding the *dari- derivation strained: "This assumption seems hypercritical, as other Greek names of famous gold coinage such as the Kroiseioi or the later Philippeioi refer to those who instituted them."^[5] Croesus gave his name to the croeseid and Philip to the Philippeioi; that Darius should give his to the daric is the plainest reading. Martin Price offered the mediating position: Greek coin-names, he observed, often name a weight standard rather than a design, and since Darius's weight reform tied the new gold to the Babylonian shekel, "The daric, then, may have been recognized to be a gold shekel on the standard of Darius", the king entering the name through his standard rather than his face.^[16] No inscription names the coin in Old Persian, so the question cannot be closed; but the once-fashionable certainty that the daric is not named for Darius is, on Hoernes's reckoning, itself the over-correction.^[5] The word's datable history is Greek: Herodotus uses it of Pythius's fortune, and it first appears on stone in the Athenian treasury accounts.^[6]

The metrology carries the reform's fingerprints. The croeseid gold stater weighed about 8.05 to 8.2 grams; Darius raised his new gold to about 8.35 to 8.4 grams, which is one shekel, a sixtieth of the Babylonian mina of about 500 grams, tying the coin to the weight system of his empire-wide standardisation rather than to the Lydian past. The very earliest darics, however, were still struck at croeseid weight, from which Bivar drew the neat inference that "the inauguration of the daric coinage anticipated by a short period the metrological reform".^[8] The silver siglos, by contrast, simply kept the weight of the croeseid half-stater, about 5.35 to 5.4 grams; the name is the Semitic shekel in Greek dress, and it is one of the small perversities of the system that the 'shekel' coin did not weigh a shekel, while the gold did.^[16][8]

Raising the gold while leaving the silver spoiled the tidy Lydian exchange. At the old metal ratio of about 13.3 to 1, twenty sigloi no longer quite made a daric; Herodotus's tribute arithmetic, which converts gold to silver at thirteen to one, preserves the adjusted official rate.^[17] The final correction was probably not Darius's: the Companion attributes to Xerxes the lifting of the siglos to about 5.55 to 5.6 grams, "establishing henceforth a tidy currency rate, with 20 sigloi equaling one daric", the equation that then held to the end of the dynasty.^[5] In Greek terms the values were remembered precisely. Xenophon, pricing flour on the march, notes in passing that the shekel, the siglos, "being equal to seven and a half Attic obols"; the daric answered to about twenty-five Attic drachmas, a month's pay for a mercenary soldier.^[18] The purity did the rest: with two or three per cent alloy, finer than Croesus's gold, the daric became, in Dandamaev and Lukonin's phrase, "the chief gold currency in the world of trade".^[15]

The coins were struck at Sardis, the old Lydian capital and seat of the satrap of Sparda, and early on, as Briant notes, exclusively there: the reform turned the gold revenues of Lydia, its mines still worked by private concessionaires who rendered their share to the satrapal treasury, into the king's stamped metal.^[19] Whether other mints joined later is inferred rather than attested. Carradice argues from fabric and style that the Type IV 'dagger' sigloi and the Type IIIb issues were probably parallel productions of separate mints, perhaps one in north-western Asia Minor, and a Babylonian mint has been suspected for the latest gold.^[6]

The Sardis anchorage cuts both ways, and it feeds a real disagreement about what the coinage was. Schlumberger's classic study of the hoards, confirmed by Carradice, distinguished the metals: "whereas the gold daric was an 'Imperial' coin current throughout, and indeed in use far beyond, the Persian Empire, the siglos was a local coin of Asia Minor".^[6] Price would go further and strip even the daric of its imperial billing: the findspots, he insisted, show "coinages for the satrapy of Sardes which succeeded the earlier electrum coinage of the kingdom of Lydia, with no further imperial implications".^[16] On that reading the royal coinage is a regional solution to a regional fact, the monetised west, dressed in the king's image. The field's balance treats it as a coinage regional in function and imperial in meaning.

What was not negotiable was the gold itself. Herodotus tells how Aryandes, satrap of Egypt, struck silver of conspicuous purity in imitation of the king's gold and was executed for it, Darius treating the emulation as treason; the story is the locus classicus for coinage as a royal prerogative.^[17] It should be handled with care. No 'Aryandic' coin has ever been found, and Briant is categorical: "The very existence of Aryandic coins is highly doubtful."^[19] What the anecdote securely attests is not Egyptian minting but the Greek understanding of what the daric was for. Herodotus frames Darius's coinage as a mnēmosynon, a memorial of himself such as no king had achieved, the same word he uses of monuments; the same historian sneers that Darius ran the empire like a shopkeeper, a kapēlos.^[17][19] Beneath the royal gold, meanwhile, the empire's plural coinages ran on lawfully: satraps such as Tissaphernes and Pharnabazus struck silver at their residences for military needs, and the cities of Phoenicia, Cyprus, Caria and the Greek coast minted their own types, a delegated diversity entirely of a piece with how the satrapal system governed everything else.^[15]

The hoards map the two circulations with unusual clarity. Of the silver hoards Carradice tabulated, nineteen of the twenty-two came from Asia Minor; sigloi travelled to Egypt or Syria only as any silver did, and reached Persia and Babylonia in quantity so small as to be almost token. The gold moved oppositely: daric hoards cluster in Greece and Macedonia, with finds in Italy, Cyprus, Egypt and as far as Afghanistan and Pakistan, and no hoard has ever been found containing both denominations together.^[6][5] The one was regional small money, and it worked hard: sigloi are habitually found worn slick and gashed with test-cuts and countermarks, coins that, in Carradice's words, "carried on circulating year after year, getting steadily more worn", many fifth-century pieces still passing when Alexander arrived.^[6] The other was international value storage. Darics appear in the Athenian sacred treasuries from 429/8, at Eleusis by 408/7, in the comic poets, and in private fortunes such as the hundred darics of the orator Lysias's family; an Athens hoard from the Ilissos held several hundred of them.^[20][5]

The gold's behaviour in the ground has a sting for the chronology. "There are no hoards of gold darics which can be dated to the fifth century", Carradice observes, and the known dies for the early gold types are a handful; the fifth-century daric was evidently issued on a modest scale, and gold, rarely melted down and long treasured, cannot be dated by hoard context the way silver can.^[6] That throws doubt on the ancient images of oceanic royal gold, and Price supplies the resolution: when Herodotus makes Pythius the Lydian count his fortune to Xerxes at 3,993,000 darics, the daric there is a unit of account, a weight of gold, not a census of actual coins; "it is important to recognize that the daric is here a weight of valuation and not a hoard of particular coins".^[16][17] Much of what the sources call darics was bullion reckoned in darics, and even the coins themselves, high-value and standardised, moved as much by weight as by tale.

The richest state of its age was not, at its centre, a cash economy. The Persepolis Fortification tablets, the administrative archive of Darius's own heartland, record a vast redistributive economy that took in grain, wine, beer, oil, fruit and livestock and paid them out again as graded rations to priests, officials, travellers and labour gangs; Hallock's ration tables are salaries expressed in barley and wine.^[21] Coined money appears nowhere in the system the tablets record. The slightly later Treasury archive shows payments increasingly made in silver, but silver by weight, in karsha and shekels, a 'silverisation' of the Persepolis economy rather than a monetisation; and the excavations bear the texts out, for coins are vanishingly rare finds at Persepolis and Susa. The Companion's verdict is flat: "If regal coins played any role in the Mesopotamian and Iranian economies, it is invisible today." And its explanation is flatter still: "As far as the economic system of its heartland was concerned, there was no need at all for the empire to have its own distinct Persian coinage."^[5]

That reframing has consequences for what the daric was. Root's Miššabada, pressing his archer coin into clay in place of a seal, is the only daric or siglos so far documented in action at the empire's centre, and he used it not as money but as an image, a portable royal emblem worth displaying.^[9] Nimchuk has pushed the thought to its limit, arguing that the earliest issues "did not primarily serve as money or coins in the economic sense but were tokens or medallions", instruments of the royal gift economy, the king's favour struck in gold for nobles and clients in the west; the Companion judges the idea thought-provoking but hypothetical, and it sits awkwardly with the sigloi's evident hard use.^[5] What is not hypothetical is the direction of drift. Klinkott's study of Achaemenid obligations traces service and dues rendered in kind giving way, through the fifth century, to money payments, until in the mercenary armies of the satraps and the King coined silver predominated ('bald jedoch überwog das gemünzte Silber').^[22] The money economy reached the empire late, from its western edge, and the daric rode that edge.

Where the daric genuinely worked as money was in war and diplomacy. Xenophon's Anabasis is almost a price list. Cyrus the Younger gave the exiled Spartan Clearchus ten thousand darics to raise an army, and paid his soothsayer Silanus three thousand for a well-judged prophecy; the Greek rank and file marched at a daric a month, and when they grew suspicious Cyrus bought them back with a rise, promising

a daric and a half a month to each man, instead of a daric.

Xenophon, Anabasis 1.3.21, trans. Dakyns^[18]

Even here the daric's monopoly should not be overdrawn: the payment evidence shifts toward silver and Cyzicene electrum in the later texts, and fourth-century mercenaries increasingly preferred Attic-weight coin, a criticism (pressed by Vargyas) of the old assumption that mercenary pay alone carried the coins west.^[5]

The other channel was purchase of a subtler kind. From the Peloponnesian War onward the kings learned that gold placed in the right Greek hands moved armies more cheaply than armies. The classic case is Timocrates of Rhodes, sent across the Aegean in 396/5 with the equivalent of fifty talents, some fifteen thousand darics on Hyland's reckoning, for the anti-Spartan politicians of Thebes, Corinth, Argos and Athens; within two years Sparta's enemies were at war with her and Agesilaus, campaigning deep in Asia Minor, was recalled to save the homeland.^[23] His farewell became the coinage's epitaph in Greek memory:

The king has driven me out of Asia with thirty thousand archers.

Plutarch, Artaxerxes 20, trans. Perrin^[24]

Plutarch spells the joke out, "for the Persian coin has the figure of an archer stamped upon it".^[24] The royal bowman of the dies had become the king's true infantry, an instrument of a foreign policy conducted in gold.

Behind the coinage stood the tribute, but the relation between them is loose, and Briant warns against welding Darius's coinage to his tribute reform: the tribute was assessed and paid in weighed silver, not coin, and, strictly speaking, the two measures had no necessary connection.^[19] Herodotus's assessment list reckons the yield of the twenty districts to a single annual sum of 14,560 Euboic talents, a figure quoted and weighed in full at the satrapy system.^[25]

What arrived was metal, and mostly it stayed metal. Herodotus describes the king's treasure melted and poured into earthen jars, the pottery broken away to leave solid ingots from which coin was struck only "as much as will serve his purpose" when money was wanted; Briant reads the passage, rightly, as minting on demand at the margin of an economy of stored bullion.^[17][19] Coinage, on this view, was never the destination of the tribute but an occasional conversion of it, and Darius's innovation, Briant argues, "was intended less to pay his expenses than to illustrate his power and expand his prestige".^[19] The vaults filled faster than the mints emptied them. When Alexander took Persepolis, Diodorus reports a treasury accumulated "from Cyrus, the first king of the Persians, until that time": a hundred and twenty thousand talents, "when the gold was calculated in terms of silver", the sediment of two centuries of tribute weighed at the last.^[26] Much of the King's daric gold was stored rather than spent, pure gold stamped with the archer, gathered in and kept.

The coinage did not quite die with the empire. Sardis fell to Alexander in 334 and the royal issues ceased there, but at Babylon his administration struck 'double darics', gold two-shekel pieces that copy the running archer of the royal dies, their chunky fabric alone betraying the new management; as Carradice observes, "When Alexander inaugurated the double-daric coinage to serve as a local currency in Babylonia he presumably felt that the earlier royal-archer coinage on which it was based had a local relevance."^[6]

The last sigloi kept circulating under the new order, turning up worn and battered in hoards at Warka, Susa and the Bhir Mound at Taxila alongside the coins of Alexander and Philip III.^[6] Even the name outlived the dynasty: Athenian inscriptions of the later fourth century could call the gold staters of Philip of Macedon 'darics', the Persian king's word become the Greek word for royal gold itself.^[16][5] It is a fitting afterlife for a coin that had always been less a currency than a claim: the king's archer, pure and unchanging, pressed into the world's hands.