Achaemenid Coinage and Payments: Darics, Sigloi, and Imperial Exchange

From about 550 to 330 BCE, the Achaemenid Empire ruled a vast territory from its Iranian heartland across Babylonia (in present-day Iraq), Anatolia (present-day Turkey), Egypt and regions around the eastern Mediterranean. Its gold daric and silver siglos gave royal officials and armies standardized coins, but people in many regions still paid by weighing silver or delivering goods. The differences between these methods show where royal coinage circulated and what kinds of payment it served.

On this page5 sections

From Lydian coins to the royal archer

After Persian king Cyrus II conquered Lydia, in western Anatolia, the Persian administration kept Sardis as a major provincial center and coin mint, or workshop. It continued striking the local lion-and-bull coins associated with the Lydian king Croesus for about thirty years. Around 515 BCE, Persian king Darius I replaced that design with a royal archer type. A dated tablet impression from 500–499 BCE confirms that the new coins were already in use.

A daric contained about 8.4 grams of gold, while a commonly issued silver siglos weighed about 5.5 grams. The official accounting relation set one daric at twenty sigloi, so the exchange value did not follow their relative weights: gold was much more valuable by weight than silver. The recurring archer design appears on the coin’s face; a punch left an irregular oblong impression on its reverse.

Regional circulation and military pay

Sardis was a major royal mint. By the fourth century BCE, satraps, the king’s provincial governors, and local dynasts in Asia Minor, much of present-day Turkey, were also striking coins, especially silver. Local Greek cities issued their own denominations as well. Silver sigloi circulated chiefly in western Asia Minor, where coin use was already established; darics moved farther, appearing in hoards in Greece, Macedonia and Italy as well as Asia Minor. As high-value gold pieces, darics suited substantial transfers and savings better than small everyday purchases.

Xenophon, a Greek participant in the 401 BCE expedition of Cyrus the Younger, a Persian prince, describes how coin could figure in military recruitment. When Greek mercenaries questioned whether they had been hired for the campaign, they asked for higher pay. Cyrus promised to raise their monthly rate from one daric to one and a half per man.

Silver by weight and salaries in goods

Minted coins were only one way to use precious metal. In Babylonia, Egypt and other regions, a contract could state a debt in silver while the actual payment was made in weighed metal. A clerk or merchant weighed the pieces and assessed their purity; ingots, rods, fragments and even coins could be treated as metal rather than accepted at a fixed face value. Coins thus existed alongside older weighing practices rather than replacing them everywhere.

In the Persepolis region of southwestern Iran, the royal administration also paid many workers and officials through a fixed salary expressed in food commodities. The Fortification tablets show how this worked for travelers: an official issued a sealed document stating the food scale to which a traveler was entitled, a supplier provided the provisions, and seals from supplier and recipient authenticated the issue before the record returned to Persepolis. Grain, wine and other supplies could meet obligations directly, without first converting them into coins.

A mixed treasure at Vouni

In the late 1920s, excavators found a jar beneath a staircase at the fifth-century BCE Vouni Palace on Cyprus’s northern coast. The deposit held 248 silver coins, almost all minted on Cyprus, alongside four darics, silver bowls, gold and silver bracelets and pendants, and pieces of gold. Numismatist Antigoni Zournatzi dates its concealment to around 390–380 BCE, during the palace’s destruction.

Zournatzi argues that the objects may be read together as a monetary hoard because unmarked gold and silver objects could also carry monetary value in the Achaemenid world.

After the Achaemenid conquest

Macedonian king Alexander’s conquest of the Persian Empire in 331 BCE brought royal mints under Macedonian rule. He introduced coins on the Athenian, or Attic, weight standard. Darics and sigloi did not disappear at once: older issues continued to circulate, and darics may still have been struck under his authority.