From Symbol to Likeness: The Emergence of the Coin Portrait in the Greek-Persian Tradition

The rendition of living (or just deceased) persons with clearly recognizable individual features on coins was developed at the intersection of Greek and Persian cultural areas as a result of the grown complexity of political power-structures. Where at first the emblem of a dominant community or a figure with the general attributes of royal authority had been sufficient to guarantee for the value of the money thus hallmarked, the increased circulation of coinages by rivalling issuers within one area called for a far more sophisticated differentiation of the various issues and the claims to rulership, which the respective images were meant to transmit. This was also true in cases, where the iconography was devised to express a certain hierarchy with different levels of power as in the various series struck by subordinates of the Achaemenid kings. Initially those coins were just intended to represent the authority of the overlord, but occasionally they were also used in competition to the ruling system, which made rather complex visual messages with a stronger emphasis on the personal identity of the respective issuer necessary. It is not by chance that at the different coinages of Lycia, where numerous dynastic clans competed with each other in a comparatively small and secluded space beyond the immediate range of superior influence, the first attempts to a distinction of the various issuers by a gradual adoption of their individual likenesses on the coins in their names have been made. The dissolution of the traditional order and the new political arrangement of the various territories in Anatolia and the Middle East brought about by the campaign of Alexander led to a multiplication of regional power-centres, – all with their own coin issues, that represented competing claims to rulership. Beginning with the coinages of the Ptolemies and of the Seleucids more and more individual portraits of the respective rulers were applied on the coins in order to make the issuing entities easier to distinguish from each other even by illiterate users. Only in some rather remote and secluded areas at the periphery of the different power-blocks, where there was no constant influx of other currencies, a merely symbolic representation of the rulers was still functional for some time.