From weighed silver and Achaemenid-era imports to the kings of Sophene, the coins of Tigranes the Great, the Cilician tram and the modern dram — a source-backed overview of roughly 2,500 years of monetary history on the Armenian Highland.
Coinage was invented in the 7th century BC in the Aegean–Anatolian world, but the idea of money is much older. Across the ancient Near East, silver functioned as a standard of value, a means of payment and a store of wealth from the mid-3rd millennium BC onward — not as stamped coins, but as rings, bars, ingots and cut fragments weighed out at each transaction (see L. Peyronel, “Ancient Near Eastern Economics: The Silver Question”, and the survey “Money and Exchange Mechanisms in the Near East”). A University of Haifa study of hoards from the Levant likewise argues that weight-based silver currency was operating there centuries before the first coins (report).
The Armenian Highland — with its rich metal resources, its Urartian palace economy and its position between Mesopotamia, Anatolia and the Caucasus — belonged to this same world. Direct, quantified evidence for how Urartian and early Armenian households paid for things is thin, and this article does not claim more than the general Near Eastern pattern allows: before coins, value was measured in weighed metal, grain, livestock and goods. Even in the 5th–4th centuries BC, the standard numismatic survey by Khachatur Mousheghian (revised by Aram Manasaryan) notes that barter was still more typical than coin use in Armenia (ANRO, “The History of Armenian Numismatics”).
The earliest numismatic finds in Armenia date to the 5th century BC. According to Mousheghian and Manasaryan, they include a silver Achaemenid coin found in Yerevan, two silver coins of Miletus found during excavations at the fortress of Erebuni, and three old-style silver Athenian tetradrachms found at Sisian (ANRO; also A. Mousheghian, Anabasis 10, 2019).
Not every researcher treats all of these early pieces as foreign. A paper by G. Vardumyan on mythological imagery in ancient Armenian coinage (PDF) describes the most ancient coins found in Armenia as belonging to the 6th–5th centuries BC and associates them with local Eruanduni (Yervanduni) circles in the Achaemenid period, pointing in particular to lion-head types from Erebuni. The mainstream numismatic reading, followed by the ANRO survey and by Mousheghian, treats the Erebuni pieces as Greek imports and dates the first local royal issues to the 3rd century BC. The question of whether any pre-Hellenistic coinage was struck by or for local dynasts remains open to further die-level and metallurgical study.
In the early 4th century BC, the Achaemenid satraps connected with Armenia, Tiribazus and Orontes, issued coins in Asia Minor — at Issus, Mallus and Tarsus in Cilicia and at several Ionian and Mysian towns. There is no evidence that Tiribazus’s coins circulated in Sophene or Lesser Armenia, though circulation in the western districts cannot be excluded. Coins of the Achaemenid satraps of Armenia are generally rare (ANRO).
The wealth of the period is better seen in metalwork than in coinage — for instance the hoard of Achaemenid-style silver rhyta from Erebuni, studied by Mikhail Treister (Ancient Civilizations from Scythia to Siberia 21, 2015).
From the late 4th century BC the Attic weight system gradually penetrated and took root in Armenia. Mousheghian and Manasaryan give the units as follows (with their Armenian equivalents):
| Unit | Weight | Armenian term |
|---|---|---|
| Talent | c. 26.20 kg | taghand (տաղանդ) |
| Mina | c. 436.6 g | mnas (մնաս) |
| Drachm | c. 4.366 g | dram (դրամ) |
| Obol | c. 0.728 g | oboghos (օբօղոս) |
| Chalkos | c. 0.091 g | kaghkos (քաղկոս) |
One talent equalled 60 minae, one mina 100 drachms, one drachm 6 obols and one obol 8 chalkoi. The gold stater (c. 8.6 g) appears in Armenian sources as sater (սատեր) but played little role; payment was mainly in silver. The gold:silver ratio was roughly 1:10, so a stater was worth about twenty silver drachms (ANRO).
This is the root of the modern word: the Armenian dram is the drachm, and Armeniapedia notes that the word means “money” and is cognate with the Greek drachma.
The commonest coins of the period were the silver drachms and tetradrachms of Alexander the Great and his successors, minted at Babylon, Miletus, Ephesus and other centres that traded with Armenia. Gold issues of Alexander are comparatively scarce on the Highland, unlike in the north-west Caucasus. Later in the 3rd–2nd centuries BC, Seleucid coins (Antiochus IV, Demetrius I, Alexander Balas and others), Phoenician tetradrachms from Aradus, Sidon and Tyre, and drachms of the Cappadocian kings Ariarathes IV and V and Ariobarzanes I circulated in Armenian cities (ANRO).
The first coins issued by Armenian rulers were struck for the kings of Sophene (in today’s south-eastern Turkey) in the 3rd century BC (CoinWeek, “Ancient Coinage of Armenia”). Sophene was ruled by a branch of the Armenian Orontid dynasty, and its kings issued bronze only (CoinWeek, “Ancient Coins of the Kingdom of Sophene”).
Because these coins were copper, they served local small-scale trade rather than international exchange; they are known mostly from hoards in the Sophene region and probably came from the city of Arsamosata (ANRO). The Orontid–Hellenistic kingdom of Commagene is the other early centre of Armenian-royal coinage mentioned by Mousheghian. For a modern, searchable record of these coins, see the ANRO archive of Sophene and Commagene.
With Artaxias I (c. 190–160 BC), who united the Armenian lands in a single monarchy, Great Armenia acquired its own royal coinage. His small bronzes — dichalka — are notable for Aramaic legends and a bearded head in an upright, peaked royal cap (CoinWeek). Mousheghian lists the Artaxiad sequence from Artaxias I to Tigranes VI, with the exact regnal dates differing slightly between authors (ANRO; the standard catalogues are P. Z. Bedoukian, Coinage of the Artaxiads of Armenia (1978), Y. T. Nercessian, Armenian Coins and Their Values (1995), and F. L. Kovacs, Armenian Coinage in the Classical Period (2016)).
Coins of Tigranes I (c. 123/121–96 BC) carry the Greek legend “Great King Tigranes, Philhellene” and circulated mainly in the south-west of the Highland (CoinWeek).
Tigranes II the Great (c. 95–56 BC) created a genuine imperial coinage. His series, struck at Artaxata and Tigranocerta in Armenia and at Antioch and Damascus in Syria, bear the legend Basileos Basileon Tigranou — “of Tigranes, King of Kings”. The classic silver tetradrachm shows the king’s head in the Armenian tiara decorated with a star between two eagles; the reverse shows the Tyche of Antioch seated on a rock, with the river-god Orontes swimming at her feet, often within a laurel wreath (Silver database, tetradrachms of Artaxata, 77–72 BC; drachms of Artaxata, 78–72 BC). The Silver database records a die study of the Artaxata drachms by Nercessian (2006), and a Brussels-based project catalogues overstrikes of Tigranes’s bronzes on earlier coins of Damascus, Antioch and Aradus (example).
Two features stand out:
Tigranes’s reverses carry Nike, Tyche, a lion’s head, a cornucopia and the national hero-god Vahagn, identified with Heracles. The dating on his coins follows the Seleucid era.
In the Roman period, Armenian numismatics increasingly tells a story of two empires. The coinage of Armenia’s last Artaxiads is classified by Anahit Mousheghian as Armeno-Roman, and denarii of the 1st–2nd centuries AD circulated widely in Armenian markets (Anabasis 10).
After the fall of the Artaxiads, no Armenian king minted coins for a long time. The Arsacid kings of Armenia (from AD 54/66) did not strike their own coins; only the central Parthian branch of the dynasty had that right (ANRO). Yet Armenia appears constantly on Roman coins:
On the Highland itself, hoards from this era — most famously the Garni hoard, which contains Roman silver from Vespasian to Commodus (the latest coin dating to 182–192) — show that Roman denarii effectively served as Armenia’s silver money in the 2nd century AD. A Sasanian drachm of Ardashir I found at Garni in 1963 reveals the beginning of the next monetary era.
Artaxata itself issued small civic bronzes bearing the city’s name. Mousheghian dates this coinage to AD 181–183, calling Artaxata the first Armenian city to put its name on coins; the same article’s illustration, however, shows an Artaxata civic bronze dated to 55/4 BC, and the dating of these issues is a live question in the literature. (See our related article on the 1st-century BC civic bronze from Artaxata, linked at the end of this piece.)
By the 3rd–5th centuries the dominant silver currency was the Sasanian drachm of about 4 g, since Roman silver had become heavily debased. In the later 4th century local imitations of late Roman coins appear, as shown by a hoard from Yerevan, and Byzantine gold circulated in the trading city of Dvin.
A remarkable special case is the series of Sasanian drachms struck in Armenia under Yazdegerd I, Peroz, Balash, Kavad I, Khosrow I, Hormizd IV, Khosrow II and Ardashir III. They are purely Sasanian in weight and design and differ only by an abbreviated Pahlavi legend naming Armenia. A tiny silver piece of Shapur — the son of Yazdegerd I — may be tied to his enthronement as king of Armenia in 416–420, a story preserved by Movses Khorenatsi (ANRO).
In the 6th–7th centuries Persian and Byzantine coins circulated side by side; finds from Dvin and from the Leninakan hoard record the shifting frontier between the two empires. Gold in Armenian sources was called dahekan (դահեկան).
After the Arab conquest the Highland formed part of the province of Arminiya. The first Umayyad coin struck in Armenia dates to AH 78 (AD 697/8), after Caliph Abd al-Malik’s monetary reform. Most Umayyad copper fulus with the mint mark “Arminiya” seem to have been struck at Dvin (Arabic Dabil), the administrative centre. Abbasid coins followed, with dirhams and copper coins minted at Dvin, Bardha’a and other towns until AH 332 (AD 943/4). Over 200 Abbasid governors of Armenia and Albania appear on coins from 759 to 833 (ANRO).
The Armenian word dram was now used to render the Arabic dirham, dahekan the dinar, and pogh (փող) the copper fals.
The emergence of the Bagratid kingdom of Ani is a political milestone, but it is not matched by an Armenian royal coinage. According to Mousheghian, there is no evidence — in coin hoards or otherwise — that the Bagratid kings or princes of Shirak minted their own coins; the Abbasid dirham remained the main silver of the 9th–10th centuries, with the emirs’ issues of the Sajids and Sallarids as lesser components. In the 10th–11th centuries, Byzantine gold and copper dominated, and in Ani a large hoard of Byzantine coppers has been found.
A first real Armenian-language coinage after antiquity appears only after the Byzantine annexation of Ani. The Lori branch of the Bagratids under Kiurike II (1048–1100) struck copper coins of Byzantine type, with the image of Christ and an Armenian legend invoking God’s help for Kiurike the kouropalates (ANRO).
Through the 12th–13th centuries, Armenian markets used Seljuk copper, Georgian copper coins of Queen Tamar and Queen Rusudan, and later the silver dirhams of the Seljuks of Rum and the Mongols. Under Abaqa Khan (1265–81), the Ilkhanids even struck coppers with trilingual inscriptions in Mongol, Arabic and Armenian — a cross in the centre and religious formulas aimed at the Christian population. Ani minted a copper coin with a human figure under Sulayman Khan (1339–44). The Ilkhanid reform of Ghazan Khan introduced a new silver system around 1300, but silver was soon debased.
The Armenian kingdom of Cilicia, founded by the Rubenid Levon I, is the zenith of medieval Armenian coinage. Wealth from East–West trade produced “some of the most handsome and popular medieval coins” in the collectors’ market (CoinWeek, “Coins of Medieval Armenia”).
The name matters: silver “dram or tram” coins were issued from 1199 to 1375, as the Wikipedia article notes, which is why the 1993 currency name is understood as a deliberate return to this royal-era term. The online Cilician Armenian Numismatic Archive holds a catalogue of these coins.
From the 16th century, Safavid silver — the shahi, then Shah Abbas I’s abbasi of 1595, c. 7.7 g — dominated Armenian markets, alongside European silver talers. Between 1703 and 1704, an Erivan mint struck Ottoman silver (onlik, beshlik), and the Qajar tumans of Fath-Ali Shah were struck at Erivan in 1817–1820. After the Russian annexation, Russian imperial gold, silver and copper became the general currency (ANRO).
The first independent Republic of Armenia (1918–1920) used Russian rubles. The Armenian banknotes designed by the painter Arshak Fetvadjian, which kept the ruble denomination, were being printed in Europe when Armenia became Soviet in December 1920; they were never put into circulation (ANEC, “This Week in Armenian History”). From 1924 to 1993 Armenia used Soviet banknotes and coins (Currency Museum).
After the 1991 independence referendum, the Central Bank of Armenia was established on 27 March 1993 with the exclusive right to issue the national currency (Wikipedia, Armenian dram). Armenia was one of the last post-Soviet states to introduce its own currency: the dram entered circulation on 22 November 1993, replacing the Soviet ruble at 200 rubles to 1 dram (Currency Museum; Currency of Armenia). The unit is subdivided into 100 luma (լումա).
The early notes of 1993–95 and the 1998 series of 50 and 100 drams were withdrawn in 2004–2005. Today’s third series of banknotes includes denominations of 1,000, 2,000, 5,000, 10,000, 20,000 and 50,000 dram (Central Bank of Armenia). Coins range from 10 to 500 drams. The notes’ imagery mirrors the national narrative: Urartian cuneiform tablets and the lion relief of Erebuni, Mount Ararat and Zvartnots, the architect Alexander Tamanyan and the poet Yeghishe Charents (Currency Museum). The dram sign (֏) was designed in 1995 and is encoded in Unicode as U+058F.
The 20th anniversary of the currency was marked with a 500-dram commemorative coin in 2013, and the 30th anniversary in 2023 with circulating 3-dram and 20-dram commemoratives (example).
| Period | Main money in Armenia | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Before the 5th century BC | Weighed silver and other metals; barter | Regional Near Eastern pattern |
| 5th–4th c. BC | Imported Greek and Achaemenid coins | Erebuni, Yerevan, Sisian finds |
| c. 330–200 BC | Alexander’s drachms; Attic standard | Silver dram as main unit |
| 3rd c. BC | First local royal bronzes (Sophene, Commagene) | Arsames, Xerxes |
| c. 190–1 BC | Artaxiad coinage | Tigranes the Great’s tetradrachms |
| 1st–3rd c. AD | Roman denarii; Artaxata civic bronzes | Garni hoard |
| 3rd–7th c. | Sasanian drachms, Byzantine gold | Drachms struck for Armenia |
| 7th–10th c. | Umayyad and Abbasid dirhams | Mint of Dvin (“Arminiya”) |
| 11th–14th c. | Byzantine, Georgian, Seljuk, Mongol coins; Kiurikid copper | Armenian legends on Ilkhanid copper |
| 1198/99–1375 | Cilician tram and tank | Royal coinage |
| 16th–19th c. | Safavid, Ottoman, Russian money | Erivan mint |
| 1920–1993 | Russian/Soviet rubles | Unissued First Republic notes |
| 1993– | Armenian dram | 100 luma |
Armenian monetary history is, above all, a history of connection. The Highland’s silver was weighed in the Near Eastern manner, then counted in Greek drachms, then in Roman denarii, Sasanian drachms, Arab dirhams and Mongol coins — and at only a few moments (Sophene, the Artaxiads, Cilicia and, since 1993, the Republic) did Armenian rulers control the whole chain from design to circulation. Each of those moments left a distinct visual language: the Armenian tiara with its star and eagles, the Cilician lions and crowned queen, the Urartian lion of Erebuni on a modern banknote.
The continuity of the word is perhaps the most striking: the Hellenistic drachm became the Armenian dram, the medieval tram of Levon I, and the name of the national currency of the 21st century.
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