Rulers on Persian Coinage

Founder of the empire. Issued no coinage; circulated Lydian electrum and weighed silver.

Reformed imperial coinage; introduced the gold daric and silver siglos with the archer-king type.

Continued the daric/siglos system; greatest output of Type II archer sigloi.

Type IIIb and IV sigloi; satrapal coinages flourished under his reign.

Last Achaemenid king; double-daric issues continued under Macedonian rule.

Conquered Media and Babylonia; first true imperial Parthian coinage.

Adopted the title 'King of Kings'; introduced the tiara portrait.

Returned the Roman standards lost at Carrhae; widely struck tetradrachms at Seleucia.

First Parthian coins with Aramaic legends alongside Greek.

Last Arsacid king; defeated by Ardashir I at Hormizdagan.

Founder of the Sasanian Empire; introduced the fire-altar reverse standard.

Captured the Roman emperor Valerian; commemorative gold dinars from Ctesiphon.

Eastern dinars from Sind and Marv; subject of Persian epic and legend.

Reformed silver coinage to a thin, broad standard struck in vast quantities.

The longest-reigning Sasanian; tens of millions of drachms still survive.

Last Sasanian king; coins continued posthumously under the early Caliphate.

Reformed Islamic coinage in 696/697: purely epigraphic dinar and dirham with no images.

High point of Abbasid gold dinar — set the trans-imperial standard.

Revived the title shahanshah on dirhams struck across western Iran.

Bilingual Arabic-Sanskrit dirhams from Lahore — first Indo-Islamic coinage.

Pinnacle of Seljuq gold dinar minting from Nishapur and Isfahan.

Converted to Islam; reformed coinage to a uniform standard across the Ilkhanate.

Coinage in the name of puppet Chagatai khans; foundation of the Timurid silver tanga.

Astronomer-king of Samarqand; refined silver tankas from Herat.

Founder of the Safavid state; coins from Tabriz proclaim the Twelve Imams.

Extensive coinage from Mashhad and Tabriz; consolidation of Twelver Shi'ism.

Introduced the silver abbasi; moved capital to Isfahan with its grand mint.

Last effective Safavid; coins continued briefly after the Afghan capture of Isfahan.

Conqueror of Delhi; struck silver rupees from looted Mughal bullion at Kabul and Mashhad.

Refused the title 'shah'; coins struck at Shiraz, Khoy and Isfahan in the name of the Hidden Imam.

Iconic gold tomans from Tabriz, Isfahan and Ganja with elaborate Nowruz issues.

First Iranian ruler to adopt machine-struck coinage; reformed toman/qiran system.

Granted the constitution of 1906; coinage and Imperial Bank notes from his reign.

Last Qajar; deposed by Reza Khan, the future Reza Shah Pahlavi.

Introduced the modern Rial in 1932; Tehran mint produced the entire national currency.

Issued the 2,500-year commemorative banknotes and the gold Pahlavi series.

Bank Markazi Jomhuri Eslami Iran issues all modern Rial and Toman coinage and banknotes.