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Message:: [QUOTE="Finn235, post: 7464667, member: 98035"]Had one of these in my sights for a good while, but finally pulled the trigger in the last Leu auction. [ATTACH=full]1293015[/ATTACH] Host coin:Peroz I AR Drachm457-484AS mint (modern Khuzestan, unknown city) Countermarks: All applied in Central Asia, ca. 6th century AD #1, 3:00Soghdian tkyn, "Tegin" Göbl 82a[ATTACH=full]1293016[/ATTACH] #2, 9:00Soghdian tkyn, different calligraphyGöbl 82[ATTACH=full]1293017[/ATTACH] #3, 6:00Soghdian dscy/bgy, "God the Creator"Göbl 79[ATTACH=full]1293018[/ATTACH] Peroz I was the younger son of Yazdegerd II. When his father died in 457, Hormizd III rightfully inherited the throne, but Peroz felt him unfit for rule. Peroz split the royal houses of Iran in his favor, and fled to recruit allies of the Hephthalite Huns to the northeast. They agreed to help him, and in 459 Hormizd III was captured and executed, leaving Peroz undisputed on the throne. The early years of his reign were marred by drought and famine, further complicated by the fact that the Sassanians were required to pay tributes to the Kidarite huns of NW India, following several disastrous defeats earlier that century. Attempting to weasel his way out of tribute, Peroz dressed up a peasant girl as an Iranian princess and offered her in marriage to the Kidarite king. This was discovered, and the Kidarites requested 300 elite soldiers from Peroz to help train their armies. The soldiers returned to Iran with their hands cut off with a message that the ruse was discovered, whereupon Peroz declared war on the Kidarites in about 464. After being denied a loan by Byzantine emperor Leo, Peroz once again turned to the Hephthalites for aid, who agreed to help him. The Kidarites were defeated by the Sassanian-Hephthalite alliance by about 466, and the Huns took it upon themselves to fill the power vacuum left by the collapse of the Kidarites. This no doubt concerned Peroz, and for whatever foolhardy reason, he turned on his former friends and allies, hoping to topple them in a surprise attack in 474. This failed disastrously, and Peroz was captured and held captive. Emperor Zeno paid this first ransom, in exchange for the promise of peace between the Sassanians and Byzantines. Humiliated, Peroz could not leave well enough alone, and plotted a second punitive campaign in which he sought to vanquish his former allies. Attacking them in the late 470s or early 480s, he was once again defeated, captured, and forced to ransom himself. The Hephthalites demanded "30 mule carts" of silver coin, probably in the hundreds of thousands or millions of drachms. Emptying the treasury, he could only pay 20 carts of silver, and was forced to send his son Kavadh into captivity as collateral for the other 10, which he paid a few years later after raising taxes on his subjects. Utterly humiliated, Peroz somehow got it into his mind that "the third time's the charm" and waged war one final time in 484, hoping to recover his lost treasury and his dignity. This time, the Sassanian king perished in battle, purportedly when his army was tricked into being driven into a deep trench that was dug for the purpose of ensnaring his army. This marked the lowest point of the Sassanian empire prior to their defeat at the hands of the Arabs, as the Hepthalites had reduced the grand Sassanian Empire to the status of a tributary state, and they even deposed Peroz's brother Balash in favor of the more pliable Kavadh. Briefly, the Hepthalites ranked among the world's superpowers, equaled in size, wealth, and might only by the Byzantines and China. The Hephthalites however were defeated a century later by a joint alliance between the Sassanians under Khusro I, grandson of Peroz, and the Turkic Khaganate. It is believed that these drachms of Peroz, all heavily worn and usually covered with Soghdian-language countermarks, were most likely part of the mule-carts used to ransom Peroz and his son, as many of these countermarks only appear on coins of Peroz. Numismatically, the ransom of Peroz was one of the most significant events of Central Asian numismatics, as the sudden influx of these coins entrenched them as the new standard of what "good money" should look like, sparking imitative series that would continue in one form or another for nearly 900 years. The Hepthalites themselves minted imitations of relatively crude fabric, adding four large pellets to the obverse die margins[ATTACH=full]1293065[/ATTACH] [ATTACH=full]1293071[/ATTACH] These persisted for perhaps 100-200 years, terminating in northern Tokharistan[ATTACH=full]1293066[/ATTACH] Shortly after the initial ransom, an unknown party introduced the type to India, where they were imitated locally[ATTACH=full]1293068[/ATTACH] Became the "dramma" AKA Gadhaiya Paisa, the chief silver coin of post-Gupta India[ATTACH=full]1293069[/ATTACH] And finally fizzled out when Malwa fell to the Muslim invaders, ca 1350 AD[ATTACH=full]1293070[/ATTACH][/QUOTE]

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