OF DARICS, STATERS, AND DISKS: SOME ISSUES IN ACHAEMENID IMPERIAL SPACE Christopher J. Tuplin i. preamble Coinage and imperial space is a capacious topic: coins are good at cross- ing space, even if many end up in very localised holes in the ground. There are many ways in which it could be addressed. One might try to catalogue the variable circulatory reach of all the coinages that come from within impe- rial territory: how much space do how many coins actually occupy? Or one could turn to a specific set of holes in the ground and contemplate the Apadana deposit, 1 for one approach here has been to suggest that coins symbolized im- perial space: Antigoni Zournatzi (2003) thinks that Darius was celebrating the western outreach of empire, while Cindy Nimchuk (2002) ends up linking the deposit with four of the seven acts of creation and evoking a positively cos- mic space. I take Zournatzi’s point that Persian rule exceeded the bounds of earlier Mesopotamian empires, but I do wonder whether it was appropriate to concentrate attention on just one part of the empire whose four corners were celebrated on the associated trilingual tablets and whose extent and diversity in all directions was eventually depicted on the Apadana stairways. Nimchuk’s approach evades that problem, but her result is necessarily speculative—to say the least. Or, sticking with Persepolis but activating the heuristic principle that if you want to investigate X, you look at the absence of X, we could consider the tariff-based system of silver payments in whole or partial substitution for food-stuff allocations encountered in the Persepolis Treasury tablets and ponder what sort of monetary process is involved. Coins are not part of the deal, but the system—and the apparent contrast with the Fortification archive, in which remuneration by food allocation reigns supreme 2 —has a strange resonance with the statement in ps.-Aristotle’s Oeconomica (1345b28) that the king decides what is paid in coin and what in ¶ t! nom’smati Ånia or, in Makis Aperghis’s (2004: 121) version, únt“ nom’smatow Ånia (“goods in place of coin”). One could even venture to wonder whether Richard Hallock’s (1960) analysis of the system is correct. Instead I start with darics, which certainly got around imperial space (and well beyond it), though whether this means they had currency everywhere depends 1 Schmidt 1956: 110, 113–114, pl. 84. 2 Henkelman (2017a: 275) observes that standard rations are only about two-thirds of adult calorie requirements and infers that workers had, or were expected to get, other sources of sustenance. This might leave open the possibility that silver payments also existed in the system to which that archive relates. (It is now known that there are documents in the Persepolis Fortification Archive which date from the period covered by the Persepolis Treasury Archive.) PHOENIX,VOL. 76 (2022) 122–145. 122