Ancient drachma

[1] The coin, usually made of silver or sometimes gold[2] had its origins in a bartering system that referred to a drachma as a handful of wooden spits or arrows.

[7][n 3] Initially a drachma was a fistful (a "grasp") of six oboloí or obeloí (metal sticks, literally "spits") originally used for roasting lamb.

Anthropological evidence suggests that obeloi were used in burials of warrior elite or in the graves of people with high social status.

Despite earlier evidence of poorly preserved specimen, the obeloi discovered at Argos were the first found completely intact.

[2] Among the Greek cities that used the drachma were: Abdera, Abydos, Alexandria, Aetna, Antioch, Athens, Chios, Cyzicus, Corinth, Ephesus, Eretria, Gela, Catana, Kos, Maronia, Naxos, Pella, Pergamum, Rhegion, Salamis, Smyrni, Sparta, Syracuse, Tarsus, Thasos, Tenedos, Troy and more.

Notable Ptolemaic coins included the gold pentadrachm and octadrachm, and silver tetradrachm, decadrachm and pentakaidecadrachm.

The 5th century BC Athenian tetradrachm ("four drachmae") coin featured the helmeted profile bust of Athena on the obverse (front) and an owl on the reverse (back).

[4] At the time, to gain legitimacy over a large geographic spread, city states relied on the intrinsic value of their coins and the promise that "its minting authority would redeem it".

[19] The valuable silver used in Athenian coins was gathered from Athens's Laurium Mines in Attica, which were subject to large-scale use and exploitation beginning in the 6th century BCE.

Historian Sitta von Reden states that, "The great number of possible explanations, none of which are {sic} wholly satisfactory, has made scholars abandon the question of the primary function of the first coinages.

Additionally, "penalties, tithes and other dues were inflicted on both priests and worshippers" and were extracted through bullion weight or coinage.

Thomas R. Martin says that the use of coinage in ancient Greece, could be loosely compared to the use of flags in the modern world.

[13] Martin says that coins thus functioned "as symbols of sovereign identity"[13] Coinage was used for rewards at athletic games, which were an integral part of Greek life.

[25] Before the Peloponnesian War (beginning in 431), which caused significant inflation, a laborer might earn one-third of a drachma per day.

[27] It is difficult to estimate comparative exchange rates with modern currencies because the range of products produced by economies of centuries gone by were different from today.

However, he said that "these comparisons of the Attic talent with a fluctuating commodity like silver at the present day are, of course, highly unsatisfactory"; using an alternate method accounting for average bullion prices over some decades, he arrived at $1,000 for a talent, which means that based solely on bullion value, a drachma would have been worth $0.16 in 1885 ($5.65 in 2023).

[29] Using a labor-equivalent calculation, a silver drachma (or denarius), which constituted a day's wage for a manual laborer, would be worth approximately the same in modern currency.

[34] Minae and talents were never actually minted: they represented weight measures used for commodities (e.g. grain) as well as metals like silver or gold.