A Greek Tragedy of an extinct Drachma Coin reminiscing ancient Hellenic glory with Aristotle’s image

Greece has been the centre of a ancient Hellenic civilization which spread all over the known world in wake of the rise of Alexander of Macedonia in the fourth century B.C.; spreading it right from Greece to Persia, Egypt, Central Asia right till the North-West frontier of the Indian subcontinent as a direct result of Alexander's expansionist campaign.

There was significant change in the world of Numismatics in the wake of Alexander’s campaign when many states began adopting the Greek Attic standard of drachms (one drachm approx. 4.37 gm) under the aegis of the Seleucid Empire which rose after Alexander's death across these territories.

India too adopted the drachm as a unit of its numismatic weight system first under the Kushans (1st Century to 3rd Century A.D.) who replaced the Indo-Greek rulers of the North-Western India and then under the Imperial Gupta dynasty in the 4th Century A.D.
The drachma survived as a name of a unit of coin weight in most Indian languages till the early medieval period as ‘dramma’ which was eventually corrupted to ‘daam’ during Akbar’s reign (r.1556-1605) till it became the term for the price of an item in later day Hindi.
Thus, the Greek drachma played a seminal role in the evolution of coins of the world in its initial gestational period.

Cut to the twenty-first century, Greece is a modern state with a flourishing economy benefitting from its shipping industry, tourism, exports, etc. However, the Greek economy has seen its economy floundering under the worst ever crisis in 2009-10 causing it to lean on more prosperous and stable members of the European Union and earning their ire. Worse still, today Greece doesn’t even have its own independent currency, the Euro having replaced the indigenous drachma in 2001. This sad state of affairs is similar to Alexander's expansionism albeit the expansion is under the European Union engulfing the first super state of European civilisation, Greece.

I came across a 5 Drachma coin in my collection having inscriptions in Greek alphabet on its obverse (image on left) written from 7’0 Clock position as
‘ΕΛΛHNIKH ΔHMOKPATIA’ read as ELLENIKE DEMOKRATIA in Roman alphabet meaning ‘Hellenic Republic’ Greece’s official name today.
The centre has its denomination written as ‘5 DPAXMAI’ read as ‘5 DRACHMAI’ in Roman alphabet or plainly 5 Drachma. The date of the coin is given as 1976.

The reverse (image on right) has the image of Greek polymath, Aristotle who amongst his many other interests was also a student of another great Greek philosopher, Plato and a teacher to Alexander of Macedon. The Greek legend on the coin is spelt as
‘APIΣTOTEΛHΣ’ transliterated as ‘ARISTOTELES’ in Roman alphabet or plain ‘ARISTOTLES’

The Drachma was revived with the establishment of the modern state of Greece in 1832 and was issued in three different phases between the two world wars. The third phase coincided with Greece’s domestic crisis in the form of the rule of a military junta between 1967 and 1974.

In 1976, after the fall of the military junta and the installation of a new parliament of the Hellenic Republic, a new series of eight denomination coins carrying images of ancient heroes of the Greek nation was issued and this tiny cupro-nickel coin was a part of that historic series. Hence, this coin today represents a crisis in the world of coins where larger economic interests are subsuming indigenous coinage at a very large cost of loss of national and cultural identities.

A Pan-Asian currency, anyone?