The danake or (Greek: Greek, Ancient (to 1453);: δανάκη) was a small silver coin of the Persian Empire (Old Persian), equivalent to the Greek obol and circulated among the eastern Greeks. Later it was used by the Greeks in other metals.[1] The 2nd-century AD grammarian Julius Pollux gives the name as danikê or danakê or danikon and says that it was a Persian coin,[2] but by Pollux's time this was an anachronism.[3]
The term as used by archaeologists is vague in regard to denomination. A single coin buried with the dead and made of silver or gold is often referred to as a and presumed to be a form of Charon's obol. Numismatists have also found the an elusive coin to identify, speculating that the Greeks used the term loosely for a demonetized coin of foreign origin.[4]
In Persia, the was originally a unit of weight for bulk silver, representing one-eighth of a shekel (1.05 gm).[5] This use of the word became obsolete. In the Hellenistic period and later it designated the silver Attic obol, which originally represented the sixth part of a drachma; in New Persian dâng means "one sixth".
See main article: Charon's obol. The is one of the coins that served as the so-called Charon's obol, which was placed on or in a dead person's mouth to pay the ferryman who conveyed souls across the river that divided the world of the living from the world of the dead.[6] Charon's obol is sometimes specifically called a naulum (Greek Greek, Ancient (to 1453);: ναῦλον, "boat fare").[7] The Christian-era lexicographer Hesychius gives "the obol for the dead" as one of the meanings of Greek, Ancient (to 1453);: δανάκη,[8] and the Suda defines the as a coin traditionally buried with the dead for paying the ferryman to cross the Acheron.[9] In literary sources, the smallness of the denomination was taken as a reminder that death is an equalizer of rich and poor.[10]
Although Charon's obol is usually regarded as Hellenic, archaeology indicates that the rite of placing of a coin in the mouth of the deceased was practiced also during Parthian and even Sasanian times in the region that is present-day Iran. The coin, however, was customarily a drachma.[11] In his entry on the Greek, Ancient (to 1453);: δανάκη, Hesychius implies that the coin was mentioned by Heracleides of Cyme in his lost work Persica around 350 BC, placing its use (perhaps erroneously) in the Achaemenid period.[12]
Gold are frequently found in graves. In a Thessalian burial of the 4th century BC, a gold had been placed on the lips of a woman, presumed from her religious paraphernalia to be an initiate into the Orphic or Dionysiac mysteries. The coin was stamped with a Gorgon's head.[13]
In archaeological investigations of Greece since the mid-1990s, have tended to be found in cemeteries. At a necropolis at Hephaisteia on Lemnos, exploration of which began in 1995, the many finds in unlooted graves included a gold .[14] In the late 1990s, a cemetery in northwest Greece yielded objects dating from the mid-4th to the early 3rd centuries BC, including oinochoai, unguentaria, a wreath with thin gold leaves (sometimes associated with Orphic religion), a gold, and a silver obol with a winged Pegasus.[15] A gold of Geta dating 199–200 A.D. was among objects – including potsherds, animal bones and shells, and bronze coins – retrieved from a well in the center of a cemetery in central Macedonia. The well was surrounded by a paved floor and housed by a stone structure. It is thought that the deposition followed funerary meals and offerings to the dead.[16]
In investigations reported 2004–2005, a single gold was found along with bronze coins and glassware in an Achaian cemetery where both adults and children had been buried in wooden coffins.[17] Graves in Euboia yielded pottery and glassware, small bone tools, iron strigils, and gold jewelry and .[18] In Epiros, graves and funerary chests yielded gold along with kantharoi, lamps, pyxides, figurines, gold rings, gold oak leaves, iron strigils, a bone flute, fragments of funerary stelae and a marble head of a young man. The items dated from the 4th to the 2nd century BC. Excavations at a Hellenistic cemetery in the same area uncovered five gold along with seventeen perfume flasks,[19] twenty-six vessels, a bronze strigil, an iron spearhead, terracotta figurines and a funerary pelike with gorgoneia at the base of the handles.[20]
The word "" continued in use into the Middle Ages as Arabic, Persian or, and post-classical Sanskrit .[21] The name has been connected to the silver tangka of India, which had the same weight.[22]