2021-08-09 Mon

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 simplifying the various denominations into lesser weight variants, 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) that the empire saw the discarding of the Croesus series into the warrior king Sigloi and Daric issues.

Croesus is a noteworthy figure in ancient numismatics, as he is believed to have pioneered the idea of a bi-metallic coinage system that contained both gold and silver coins of high purity. These coins featured on the obverse the confronted foreparts of a lion and a bull, and a simple incused punch on the reverse.

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