Ancient Persia. Cyrus the Great. Achaemenid Empire. 546-510BC. Silver siglos. 5.38g. Rare. VF. Lion fighting a bull with 2 reverse incuse punches. Based off the Kroisos series design. Comes with silver and gold metals. Cyrus the Great was a great warrior king who founded the Achaemenid Empire, the first unified empire of the Ancient World which stretched from Central Asia, Northern India and the Eastern Mediterranean. Having no coinage of their own, when the last Lydian King Croesus was defeated and his land combined with Cyrus', the ancient coinage adopted by the Lydians became used as the currency of the Achaemenid Empire although with slight variations. Amongst them include: 1) simplifying the various denominations into lesser weight variants, 2) a less defined lion & Bull motif and especially for layer issues, the paw of the lion was removed. It wasn't until the reign of Darius I (the great) from 522-486BC that the empire saw the discarding of the Croesus series into the famous warrior king Sigloi and Daric issues. Thus many previous issues were either melted or stopped circulating altogether making them rare.
Wow! Great capture @Loong Siew ! Nice, I have been wanting one those! Since you had to throw out Siglos and Daric, here are a couple of mine: ACHAEMENID PERSIA: Persia Achaemenid Empire Darius I 510-486 BCE AR 0.11g 5mm 1/32nd Siglos Persian hero-king in running incuse Klein 758 Rare PERSIA Achaemenid Darius I-Xerxes II 485-420 BC AV Daric 14mm 8.3g LydoMilesian Sardes king wearing kidaris kandys quiver spear bow Incuse Carr Type IIIb Group A-B pl XIII 27
Thanks @Severus Alexander .. You can refer to this link for a pretty good write up.. http://rg.ancients.info/lion/kroisos.html
Thanks @chrsmat71 .. Hopefully one day when I strike it rich I may consider the gold staters.. For now I can only dream and enjoy this silver sigloi fully
Your siglos is fantastic, @Loong Siew – congratulations on this acquisition! Some recent and from my non-expert perspective convincing scholarship on the later sigloi and dareikoi argues that these types constitute Lydian regional issues instead of Achaemenid imperial coins. An English-language article on this topic can be found here, and it has been discussed on CT here. Following this thesis, your siglos would have to be considered a widespread Lydian type minted in but not for the Achaemenid empire.
Please see my comment/request added to the earlier thread. I really would like to read this piece by Corfú, but will not give my real name to the ad-men. For me the litmus of scholarship is not how convincing it sounds/seems based on my intuition, but how well it accounts for the evidence observed by other serious students of the subject. The growth of knowledge is a dialectic, so I am anxious to see the intersection.
Perhaps. I am not an expert on this field as well The article you provided seem to focus on the post Daric sigloi of the warrior king. That one I totally agree. However my take is that Croesus kingdom was not that big thus likelihood of significant variation to the central design seems low. Also, Croesus issues have a high degree of artistic detail to them. Almost Greek like in their design. This specimen on the other hand displays a rather stylised form particularly the bull. The weight also seems to conform to the Achaemenid standard but that could also be attributed to the fact that Cyrus copied the Lydian standard. Finally, the flan seems irregular and appears to have poorer quality control unlike the almost globular issues of Croesus. Anyways, either Croesus or Cyrus, this siglo circulated around the period and reigns of 2 historically significant individuals.. Something which I like about my coins associated with a story, personality or historical event
