The Daric (and the Siglos)

Toward the end of the sixth century BCE, as Darius set the empire's tribute and tax on a new footing, he ordered the striking of a gold coin of exceptional purity and a silver coin to go with it. The gold piece the Greeks called the dareikos statēr, the daric; the silver they called the siglos (a word cognate with the Semitic shekel). Both bore on their face the same image, a crowned archer with a bow, and no legend; the back carried only the rough oblong dent of the punch that held the blank against the die. The daric weighed about 8.4 grams and was the purest gold coin the ancient world produced; the siglos weighed about 5.5 grams of silver, and twenty of them went to one daric. Together they formed the bimetallic standard of the King of Kings. Yet the coin's importance is easily overstated, and the honest account of it is as much about where it did not go as where it did. The heartland of the empire scarcely used coin at all; the daric was a western and a military instrument, the face of the King's reach in the markets and the mercenary camps of Anatolia and the Aegean, while behind it the vast machinery of the Persian state moved grain and silver by weight and paid its servants in rations. This entry keeps the object, its image, and the economy it belonged to distinct, because each is understood to a different degree.

The two coins

The daric and the siglos were a matched pair, gold and silver, geared to 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". The gold was very nearly pure. 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, Histories 4.166, trans. Macaulay 1890)

The daric's weight of about 8.4 grams was no accident. At Darius's great reform a new weight-standard for gold was set: against the slightly lighter Lydian gold stater of a little over 8 grams, the new daric was tied to the old Mesopotamian shekel, a mina of about 504 grams, of which one-sixtieth is 8.40 grams. The silver siglos kept the weight of the older silver Croesus stater, struck as a half of it at about 5.5 grams. Under Darius the ratio of value between gold and silver was corrected from the old Lydian figure of about 1:13.3 to 1:13, and the official rate fixed at one daric to twenty sigloi. In the Greek reckoning a siglos was worth 7.5 Attic obols, and the daric answered roughly to the Euboïc-Attic didrachm, for these coins were aimed westward, at the world where the Attic tetradrachm was becoming the trade currency of the eastern Mediterranean.

The royal archer

What gave the coinage its character, and its Greek nickname, was the image. The obverse of both daric and siglos shows a crowned figure with a bow (the toxotēs, the archer), and the type stayed remarkably fixed across the empire's life, with the reverse left blank but for the incuse. E. S. G. Robinson sorted the archer into four main types, which are still the working scheme: Type I, the archer's torso with the crenellated crown and sleeved robe, a bow in the left hand and two arrows in the right, known only on sigloi; Type II, a kneeling archer with drawn bow and a quiver at his back; Type III, the archer in the Knielauf or running-with-bent-knees posture, moving right with a bow in the left hand and a spear in the right; and Type IV, the same running figure but holding a dagger in place of the spear. Types III and IV, by the sheer weight of surviving examples, made up the bulk of what the mints produced.

Whom the archer represents has been debated, but 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." It is the King himself, in the guise of the warrior-bowman, the same self-image the inscriptions carry, where Darius names the bow among the gifts Ahura Mazdā gave him and boasts of his own skill with it. The coin turned that royal ideology into a thing that passed from hand to hand in a foreign marketplace: as Alram notes, "in addition to their mercantile value, the darics thus had a propaganda function." And the right to strike this image was the King's alone. Herodotus preserves the story of a satrap who overstepped it and paid: the coinage was a royal prerogative, and Darius treated its usurpation as a capital crime.

To the Greeks who handled them, the coins were simply "the archers." The name was so settled that it fed one of antiquity's most quoted political jokes. When the Spartan king Agesilaus was forced to break off his campaign in Asia Minor and return home (because the King's gold had bought his enemies at his back in Greece), he is said to have remarked that he had been driven out of Asia by ten thousand Persian "archers," meaning not bowmen but darics, each stamped with the archer, spent as bribes. The anecdote, told of Agesilaus by Plutarch and preserved in the same tradition, is the perfect emblem of what the daric was for: not the coin of the daily Persian economy, but an instrument of imperial policy in the Greek west, the King's reach exercised through purchased friends rather than marched armies.

The name — Darius, or dari- "gold"?

One of the coin's oldest stories is almost certainly a false one. The ancient Greeks believed the word dareikos came from the name of Darius, who was thought to have introduced the coins; the grammarian Pollux says so outright, and the folk-link has proved unkillable. The honest position is that it is probably wrong. As the Iranica article records, "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." On this view the coin is "the golden one," named for its metal, and the tie to Darius is a Greek pun on the king who happened to issue it, attractive precisely because it was so nearly true, since Darius really did introduce the coin. Not everyone agrees: a minority (Bivar) has kept open the derivation from the royal name. But the standard scholarly reading is that the daric is named for gold, not for a king, and that the neat coincidence of dari- with Dārayavauš* is exactly the kind of accident that breeds a legend. It belongs on the short list of things "everyone knows" about the empire that the sources will not quite bear out.

Sardis and the western mint

The coins were struck chiefly at Sardis, the old Lydian capital and the seat of Achaemenid administration for the whole of Asia Minor. The choice was inherited: Sardis had been the mint of the Lydian kings, and the Achaemenids kept it running. This is the thread that ties the daric back to Croesus, the last king of Lydia, whose realm was the birthplace of coined money and whose lion-and-bull gold and silver Kroiseioi were the immediate ancestors of the Persian issues. Die-studies show that the Achaemenids, Darius included, went on striking Croesus's lion-and-bull type for a time after taking Sardis (after 546 BCE), before the change to the archer. As the leading centre of the west, Sardis was also where the tribute of the Anatolian provinces was gathered, which kept it supplied with the precious metal the mint consumed. There were probably other mints in northwestern and southwestern Asia Minor as well, and perhaps, by the end of the empire, one in Babylonia; but Sardis was the heart of it, and the daric is, in its origin and its circulation alike, a coin of the empire's western march.

A coin at the edge of a non-monetary economy

Here the received picture most needs correcting. It is tempting to imagine the Persian empire, richest of its age, as a cash economy running on gold. It was not, or not at its centre. The great administrative archive from Persepolis, the Persepolis Fortification tablets of Darius's own reign, shows a heartland that ran not on coin but on a vast redistributive economy of payment in kind: the state took in grain, wine, beer, oil, fruit and livestock as tax and tribute, stored it, and paid it back out as rations: to the gods, the royal household, the officials, the travellers on the King's roads, and the great labour-gangs. In tens of thousands of these clay accounts, the daric barely appears. Wages were reckoned and often paid in measures of barley and jugs of wine; a ration-scale was a salary expressed in commodities, graded by rank. The coin belonged to a different world (the market economies of the Greek and Anatolian west, and the pay-chest of the army), and it penetrated the Iranian heartland only slowly. (A later Persepolis Treasury archive shows the drift toward silver payments creeping in over the following generation, c. 492–458 BCE, the money economy arriving late and by degrees.)

Even where the daric mattered most, it moved as much by weight as by tale. Its high value made it unwieldy for everyday exchange, and the hoards suggest it was traded primarily as bullion (a portable, reliably pure lump of gold with the King's guarantee stamped on it), while the humbler silver siglos did the work of small change. The circulation patterns of the two coins were in fact quite separate: hoards of sigloi are found almost only in Asia Minor, where the siglos was the local currency, whereas darics turn up further afield, in Greece, Macedonia and Italy. So far, tellingly, no single hoard has been found containing both. The one coin was regional silver; the other was the international gold.

The tribute and the treasure

Behind the coin stood the tribute. Herodotus, who preserves the assessment lists, has Darius fix the yearly render of the satrapies, gold from some, silver from most, reckoned to a single sum:

"The total which was collected as yearly tribute for Dareios amounts to fourteen thousand five hundred and sixty Euboïc talents." (Herodotus, Histories 3.95, trans. Macaulay 1890)

It was this tribute (much of it arriving as bullion and metal-in-kind) that fed the mints and filled the King's vaults. And the vaults filled faster than they emptied, for the coined daric was, in part, a way of holding wealth rather than spending it. The measure of that hoarding is what the Macedonians found when the empire fell. Diodorus reports that when Alexander took the treasuries at Persepolis and Susa, the accumulated bullion of the Kings was counted at a hundred and twenty thousand talents, gold reckoned together with silver, the daric-stream of five reigns, weighed at the last. The daric, in the end, was as much a store of the King's power as a means of exchange: pure gold, stamped with the archer, gathered in from the ends of the earth and kept.

The evidence and the debate on the start date

What we know of the daric comes from three kinds of evidence, and it is worth being plain about their limits. There are the coins themselves, studied by their images (the four types), their weights, and their dies; there are the hoards, which show where the coins travelled but survive too unevenly to give firm numbers; and there are a handful of texts and inscriptions that mention the coin. The earliest datable written reference to the dareikos is not Persian at all but Athenian: the temple-treasury accounts of Athena and the other gods for the year 429/8 BCE, which list "gold darics" among the sacred funds. The literary notices (Herodotus, Xenophon) are Greek and incidental.

The sharpest scholarly argument has been over when the archer coin was first struck. The evidence turned on two finds at Persepolis. The foundation deposit of Darius's Apadana, uncovered in 1933, held eight gold Croesus staters and four Greek silver coins but no darics, suggesting that when the deposit was laid (between about 519 and 510 BCE) Darius had not yet issued his own coinage, and that the archer type therefore began soon after 515. A later study (Vickers) argued for a date after 490, but this has not persuaded. The question was effectively settled by M. C. Root, who published a small clay tablet from the Persepolis fortification archive, dated to the twenty-second regnal year of Darius (500–499 BCE), bearing on its reverse a clear seal-impression of two archers of Type II. The impression proves the coin-type was already in use by the turn of the century, and confirms that Darius was, as Herodotus says, the first Achaemenid king to strike the gold archer. The received wisdom (Darius as the author of the daric) is here vindicated by the empire's own clay, even as the folk-etymology of the coin's name is not.