Page:History of Art in Persia.djvu/485

 Medal Engraving. royal treasuries accepted everywhere at its standard value, so that it could be offered in dischaige of payments, without loss and often with a bonus, in the most distant markets. The excellent quality of these pieces, a quality they retained to the last day of their issue, contributed, no doubt, to their being justly prized ; and their extreme simplicity was no less in their favour. The first coin struck by the king was a gold stater weighing 8 grs. 40 dwt, or the sixtieth part of the light* Assyrian or Babylonic mina: then followed the silver coins of the weight of 5 grs. 60 dwt, twenty of them going to a gold piece, or real " daric" (o AapetKos).* If this name was applied by the ancients to the silver coins, it was inadvertently. Their proper denomination was "Medic siglos** (<r«yXos fii^SuctSs, or simply 0-17X09).' Subsidiary coinage, struck by cities or dynasts that had retained the right of mintage, was different in different localities. From their mints were also issued bronze pieces, the royal types being used for none but silver and gold. Darics seem to have been struck to pay the army, whilst the sigli were used to cover the expenses of the Phcenician fleet ; this we learn from several ancient texts whose evidence is con- firmed by study of the coins themselves.* The device which oftener occurs on the reverse ot the siglos is a galley (tail piece, end of chapter), a device obviously suggested by the nature of the public service of which the machinery was kept going by the issue of this particular mintage, paid by the royal treasurers to the chief officers of the squadrons. The money that Tyrian and Sidonian sailors and Greek mercenaries thus received was spent in the districts where the service called them. Hence it is that darics and silver coins are plentiful along the costs of the eastern basin of the Mediterranean and so seldom met with beyond the Euphrates in the heart of the empire. The Persian coins found in our collections come from Asia Minor, notably Syria and Egypt The etymology has been recently ^sputed by an Assyriologist who read the word dariku on a Babylonian tablet dated in the twelfth year of Nabonidus, five years before the conquest of Babylon by Cyrus, where it seems to stand for a measure or weight (Barclay V. Head, loc. cit.^ p. 698; iiutKMANN, MisalUn^ ii., in ZeUsehrifi fur As^ologie, torn. L § 4). The late Bertin, who was connected for years with the British Museum. — Trs. I have written the note in accordance with Perrot's fbnner on^ the wordtog of which agrees with well known authorities^ — Trs.
 * The word A^kum^c was generaUy accepted as derived from the name Darius.
 * Plutarch, Cimon, X, ii.
 * Fr. Lenormant, La matituUe datu ttuUifuiti, torn. L pp. 137, 138.