Guides to collecting
Persian coinage
Seven long-form, practical guides covering everything between the first purchase and the finished cabinet: choosing a theme, reading grades honestly, detecting forgeries, researching real prices, conserving metal and paper, and decoding the Pahlavi, Kufic and Naskh legends that identify a coin.
Starting a Persian coin collection
How to build a coherent collection of Persian and Iranian coinage — choosing a theme, setting a budget, sourcing responsibly, and recording provenance from the first purchase.
- Choose a theme before you buy anything
- Set a budget that buys quality, not quantity
- Where to buy — and where not to
Grading Persian and Iranian coins
Why ancient coins are graded on strike, centring and surface rather than wear alone — and how the adjectival, Sheldon and modern Iranian systems map onto each other.
- Ancient coins are not graded like modern ones
- The scales, and how they compare
- Grading modern Iranian coins and notes
Spotting fake Persian coins
Cast copies, transfer dies, tourist souvenirs and altered mint marks — the diagnostic tests that separate a genuine ancient Iranian coin from a modern forgery.
- The four families of fake
- Physical tests you can run at home
- Stylistic and epigraphic tells
Valuing Persian coins and Iranian banknotes
What actually drives price — rarity, mint, grade, provenance and metal — plus how to research realised prices instead of asking prices.
- The six drivers of price
- Research realised prices, never asking prices
- Valuing Iranian banknotes
Storing and conserving ancient coins
Inert holders, stable humidity, bronze disease, and the strict limits of what a private collector should ever do to a coin's surface.
- Environment does most of the work
- Holder materials at a glance
- Bronze disease: the one emergency
Collecting Iranian banknotes
From the Imperial Bank of Persia to Bank Markazi: the issuing authorities, the 1979 overprints, replacement notes, and how to build a complete run.
- Three issuing authorities, three collecting fields
- The 1979 overprints
- Signatures, prefixes and replacements
Reading Persian coin legends
Aramaic, Pahlavi, Kufic and Naskh: how to decode the inscriptions, mint abbreviations and regnal dates that identify an Iranian coin.
- Sasanian drachms: the most systematic coinage in the field
- Achaemenid and Parthian conventions
- Islamic-era legends: mint, date and titulature