What's The Year On This Iranian Coin?

My best guess is 2536

I see it as KM# 1174 2 Rials not sure what the date converts too but I think sometime in the 1970's or 1980's as we tell time.

MS date is 2536
SH date is 1356
AD date is 197?

might be as far back as the 1950's I'm not up on it and can't find a good conversion chart at the moment.

The MS date was part of a wider campaign by the Shah of Iran to look like a legitimate monarch. In 1971, a huge celebration was held to impress foreign visitors, celebrating the 2,500th anniversary of monarchical rule in Iran, except this was the quintessential "king parties while the people starve"... well, they weren't physically starving, but the American-backed Shah had started to become increasingly paranoid and repressive (he had already been peacefully deposed once, and the absolute monarchy was soon put back in place by the United States... hooray). He even pulled his own book off the shelves, written in a pro-democratic fashion a few years back. As the country festered, proof coins were issued for this event, and later in the 1970s coin dates were used bearing this system (with some slight changes, not sure why). This is also when the Shah began to put his head on the smaller denominations, but it didn't help change public opinion. I have the 1 rial coin in this system commemorating 50 years of his Pahlavi dynasty's rule: all kinds of monarchical symbolism was used in this time.

This awkward system of dating ended in 1979 with the Islamic Revolution - the difference between pre- and post-revolution coins of the same denomination and specifications is interesting to behold. Most significantly, the Persian lion (or the head of the Shah) was replaced with simple Farsi text reading "ISLAMIC REPUBLIC OF IRAN" and the wreaths were changed from oak and olive (?) to wreaths of tulips, symbolizing martyrdom.

And I forgot another piece of symbolism you can see in Krause!


This means "Light of the Aryans". To most of us this should evoke images of the Nazi Party and white supremacists, but the actual Aryan race lived in, well... Iran (the name of the country is short-form for "Land of the Aryans"), so this is another little change made to make the Shah look like a real monarch. You can see the whole political situation slowly unraveling in these coins.

Thanks arianzo

"MS" stands for the "Monarchic Solar" era. Year 1 was reckoned at 559 BC, the year Cyrus the Great became king of Persis, considered the founding date for the Achaemenid Dynasty. Cyrus would go on to carve out an empire stretching from Turkey to Kyrgyzstan; clearly someone whom the Shah sought to emulate.

The abandonment of the Islamic calendar in favour of one centred on a pagan dynasty was just one more grievance the Islamic revolutionaries sought to redress.