Iraqi Coins

A-Z Countries Index A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

We Want To Buy Iraqi Coins

Countries

Dawn of Civilisation
Modern-day Iraq is the home to the 'cradle of civilisation', Mesopotamia, a long strip of land in eastern Iraq based around the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. The earliest cities, established in southern Mesopotamia, date back to 5300 BC. The earliest written language, Sumerian, was first recorded in Mesopotamia in 2900 BC.
The Sumerians were eventually absorbed by the Akkadians, who forged the first known Empire in the history of civilisation in around the 2300s BC. This Empire collapsed in the 2150s BC however when Akkad was destroyed by the barbarian Gutians.
The Akkadians eventually re-emerged as a powerful Empire when they established a new city, Babylon, in 1867 BC. This city became the centre of a great empire and civilisation until it was absorbed by the Persian Empire under Cyrus the Great in 539 BC, but was inhabited until about 275 BC, when its citizens were deported by the Seleucids and the city was left to crumble into ruins.
Ancient History
With the conquest of Babylon in 539 BC, Mesopotamia (and the rest of Iraq) was annexed by the Persian Achaemenid Empire. The Achaemenid Empire was itself conquered and absorbed during the 330s BC by Alexander the Great. Following the death of Alexander in 323 BC, Mesopotamia was incorporated within the Seleucid successor state.
The Parthians conquered Babylonia in around 141 BC, and thereafter, the territories of modern Iraq were governed by the Parthian Empire until the Parthian Empire was itself supplanted by the Sassanid Persian Empire in 226 AD. Conflict between the Romans and the Parthians/Sassanids saw parts of modern Iraq occasionally fall under Roman occupation. The Roman province of Assyria encompassed part of Iraq when it was formed in 116 AD, but an internal rebellion and the decision of Hadrian to withdraw from the province in 118 meant the territory was soon restored to Parthian rule.

Arab Conquest of Mesopotamia
In 632, the Prophet of Islam, Muhammad died. His last wish had been that a war of expansion and conquest be fought against the neighbouring lands in order to forestall an invasion by a resurgent Roman (Byzantine) Empire, who looked likely to overrun the weakened Persian Empire. Accordingly, the Muslim Arabs, led by the new Caliph, Abu Bakr marched into Mesopotamia and conquered all armies sent against them in 633. Realising the danger, The Byzantines formed a rare alliance with the Persians to fight the Caliph's armies. However, this combined Persian-Byzantine force was heavily defeated at the Battle of Firaz, and Mesopotamia was conquered. This period thus marked the beginnings of the Arabisation and Islamisation of Mesopotamia. Soon afterwards, in 636, the Arab conquerors established the city of Basra in the south. Under the Caliphate, the area around Mesopotamia came to be known locally as 'Iraq'.
In around 762 AD, the city of Baghdad was established, and became for a time the political capital of the Islamic world under the Abbasid Caliphate.

The Middle Ages
Under the Abassid Caliphate, Baghdad rapidly grew into one of the world's largest metropolises, becoming the centre of the Islamic Golden Age, under which the Arabs made great strides in the fields of mathematics, science, culture and the preservation and distribution of classical literature.
However, this golden age came to a brutal end in 1258 when the Mongols conquered and sacked the city, an act of barbarism that destroyed many precious and irreplaceable texts that had been produced or preserved in the Grand Library of Baghdad (an act equal to the vandalism committed earlier in that century by a 'crusader' army that had sacked Constantinople and its own precious library in 1204). Hundreds of thousands of people in and around Baghdad were slaughtered by rampaging Mongols.
The Black Death of over a century later also devastated the population of Baghdad and Mesopotamia, as did the invasion of Tamerlane in 1401, whose soldiers were ordered to present a minimum of two heads to the brutal warlord, lest they lose their own.

Ottoman Conquest
The latter part of the Middle Ages saw Iraq come under the rule of the White Sheep Turkmen, who later lost control to the Persian Safavid Dynasty, who ruled Iraq as part of the Persian Empire. The Ottomans took control over much of Iraq during the 16th Century, although this control was lost and regained several times as the result of wars between the Ottomans and the Persians.
The Ottomans lost control of Iraq between 1747 and 1831 when Mamluk officers wrested control of the area from the Ottomans, who nevertheless remained nominal vassals of the Empire. However, the Ottomans re-established direct rule and governed Mesopotamia as parts of various eyelets or vilayets until World War I (by then, Iraq was largely divided between the vilayets of Mosul, Baghdad and Basra).

British Mandate of Mesopotamia
During World War I, the Ottoman Empire joined the Central Powers. The Mesopotamian Campaign, fought largely between British-Indian and Ottoman forces eventually saw control of Mesopotamia fall into the hands of the British.
As the Ottoman Empire was dismantled at the end of World War One, the British decided to unite the former vilayets of Mosul (dominated by Kurds) Baghdad (dominated by Sunni Arabs) and Basra (dominated by Shia Arabs) into one Kingdom ruled by the Hashemite dynasty (a dynasty that claimed direct descent from the prophet Muhammad himself). The establishment of this new country and its borders was contributed to in no small part by an Englishwoman called Gertrude Bell, an archaeologist and colonial administrator both famous and infamous for her role in establishing a country that many consider to have been made inherently unstable for having been artificially created out of three major groups with very different cultures and/or religious affiliations and having a foreign-imposed monarchy which commanded no natural allegiance amongst the peoples of Iraq.

Independence and Political Instability
The Kingdom of Iraq was granted independence from Britain in 1932. The Hashemite dynasty was not a popular one, and was seen (perhaps not unjustifiably) as a client King of the British. Faisal II was overthrown by the Arab nationalist politician Rashid al-Gaylani in 1941 during World War II.
Britain had however, maintained a garrison within Iraqi borders, and the resulting Anglo-Iraqi war saw the defeat and overthrow of Gaylani and the restoration of the Hashemite monarchy, thus ensuring the Britain retained a reliable supply of petroleum for the duration of the war.
King Faisal II was overthrown once again and executed in during the 14 July Revolution of 1958, and Iraq became a republic.
In the years following the creation of the Republic, Iraq suffered from a series of military coups until the Ba'ath Party under Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr finally seized control in another of these coups in 1968. The Ba'ath Party's ideology was based around Arab nationalism and socialism, and al-Bakr's policies revolved around land-redistribution and the use of nationalised oil industry revenue to fund public health, education and welfare projects.
Bakr was eventually edged out of power by his subordinate and protégé Saddam Hussein in 1979.

Saddam Hussein
Saddam Hussein was a man who modelled himself on Stalin, even copying his looks. He fostered a personality cult with posters and statues of himself in every town, city and municipality. And launched purges against those within the regime and without whom he viewed as potential traitors or threats to his power. One of his most notable acts of egotism was his 'restoration' of the Babylonian Ishtar gate with bricks stamped with his own name, as the Babylonian King Nebuchadnezzar had done when he ordered the construction of the original.
One of Saddam's earliest acts aimed at boosting his popularity was an ill-advised attempt to conquer Iran's oil-rich Khuzestan region to provide even more oil money for his various vanity projects. Iran was perceived by Saddam to have been weakened by the revolutionary turmoil of the previous year, but Iranians rallied around the revolutionary Islamic government and pushed the Iraqis out, and into their own territory in a bloody counter-offensive. The war lasted over 8 years and resulted in over a million deaths.

Gulf War
The Iran-Iraq war was unsuccessful and expensive, and Iraq found itself heavily in debt, particularly to Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. Both countries refused to forgive Iraq's debts. In response, Saddam accused Kuwait of violating its OPEC quota limits and stealing Iraq's oil reserves through slant-drilling techniques. Furthermore, he suggested that Kuwait was an artificial construct of the British and rightly belonged to Iraq on the basis that it had once formed part of the Ottoman vilayet of Basra.
On the 2nd of August 1990, Saddam ordered his troops to invade Kuwait and after two days of fighting, Kuwait was overrun and occupied. However, he miscalculated in assuming that the rest of the Arab world and the West would accept this fait accompli, and coalition was hastily assembled to expel Iraq from Kuwait. However, the US-led coalition stopped short of toppling Saddam through military force, and instead tried to encourage it covertly by providing some semblance of material and moral support to his opponents in the North and South of Iraq. Although this support was effective in helping the Kurds in the north gain autonomy, it was a disastrous failure in the South, and the Shia uprising in the south was brutally crushed with a medieval savagery.

George W Bush and '9-11'
The years following the Gulf War saw NATO enforcing a no-fly zone over northern and southern Iraq in order to keep Saddam isolated and contained. However, in 2001 the election of a new, more bellicose and interventionist US president and a terrorist attack in September of that year perpetrated by Middle-Eastern Muslim extremists provided a catalyst for a change in policy towards Saddam Hussein.
The emphasis of US foreign policy towards Iraq turned from one of containment to one of complete regime change.

2003 Invasion
In the wake of the September 11 terrorist atrocity, the US Government headed by President George W Bush had decided that amongst many other robust changes in US foreign policy, Saddam Hussein had to go. Saddam Hussein was unarguably a brutal and evil dictator, who had used chemical weapons against his enemies in Iran and Kurdistan. However, as part of the settlement ending the Gulf War, Saddam had agreed to dismantle his chemical weapons program. Saddam was accused of lying to UN weapons inspectors and of secretly maintaining chemical weapons stocks in violation of an agreement to destroy them. In the event, Saddam's non-compliance could not be proven, and evidence was therefore falsified to justify the invasion, although this falsification was not proven until after the invasion and occupation had already taken place.
In addition, lurid (but unproven) stories of Saddam's opponents being fed feet-first into giant industrial shredders were circulated to whip up public support for the invasion.
After a military build-up lasting several months, Saddam Hussein was issued with a final ultimatum to resign and flee, or face invasion. The ultimatum was rejected, and the allies, led by the US and Britain, invaded Iraq and Saddam's regime was quickly toppled. Saddam was eventually discovered hiding in an underground bunker, put on trial by the new Iraqi government and sentenced to death. The sentence was carried out in 2006.
In the years following the invasion, several years of insurgency and inter communal sectarian violence plagued the country. This eventually died down for the most part, and US troops finally withdrew from Iraq in December 2011, leaving a democratically elected government in charge, although ethnic and sectarian tensions and rivalries still persist.

Coinage of Iraq
The first coins used in Iraq were those of the Persian Empire, copied after those coins first struck in Lydia in the 7th Century BC. Following the conquests of Alexander the Great, Greek-style silver coins were introduced, typically featuring the head of Herakles (Hercules) on the obverse and a seated Zeus on the reverse. These Alexander drachms and tetra drachms were issued and used in the Mesopotamian region long after Alexander's death in 323 BC.
The Seleucid successor state was expelled from Mesopotamia in around 141 BC, and thereafter the Parthians issued their own coins for use in the region, based largely on the Greek model and featuring bearded portraits of the King of Parthia and typically featuring a seated archer on the reverse with legends in Greek script.
The overthrow of the Parthian Arascid dynasty by a resurgent Persian Empire, led by the Sassanid dynasty in 226 AD, saw a significant change in the coinage used in the area. Coins issued were now generally thinner and flatter than their Greek-style counterparts, and featured Pahlavi, rather than Greek script, reflecting the restoration of Persian culture by the Sassanids. Mesopotamia's location as a frontier province of the Roman and Parthian/Persian Empires resulted in Roman coinage also seeing significant usage there.
The Arab invasion and conquest starting from the 630s AD and the establishment of the Abbasid Caliphate in Baghdad saw the Iraqi city become an important location for the minting of Arab coins. Arab coins generally eschewed portraiture and the depiction of living creatures for religious reasons, instead featuring beautifully Arabic calligraphy, stating the name of the local ruler and/or the Islamic creed. This Arabic dinar-style coinage system was in other respects heavily influenced by the Byzantine and Persian coinage systems that it had replaced.
During the Ottoman period, Ottoman currency was used throughout the various eyelets and viyalets that constituted Iraqi territory during the period. During British occupation, the Indian rupee was used as the official currency of British administered Mesopotamia as it was in many other parts of the Gulf region.
Once Iraq was established as an independent kingdom in 1932, the rupee was replaced by the dinar at 13.5 rupees to 1 dinar. The dinar was subdivided into 1,000 fils. Starting from 1931, coins of 1, 2, 4, 10 fils were issued in bronze and 20, 50 and 200 fils were issued in silver. The coin of 200 fils was known as the rial. Later, in 1953, the 100 fils denomination was added, also in silver.
Following the overthrow of the Hashemite monarchy, a new series of coins in the name of the Iraqi republic was issued, in denominations of 1, 5, 10 fils in bronze and 25, 50 and 100 fils issued in silver (until 1969). In 1970, 250 fils pieces were introduced, with 500 fils and 10 dinar coins following in 1982. They were issued in a variety of shapes and sizes depending on the denomination. Surprisingly, considering the ubiquitousness of Saddam's image elsewhere, coins issued for circulation in Saddam's time did not feature the likeness of Saddam Hussein himself, and instead depicted three palm trees on the obverse.
Inflation during Saddam's rule ruined the value of the dinar, and coin production ceased in 1990 in following the Gulf War. It was not resumed again until 2004, when a short lived series of 25, 50 and 100 dinars were issued in copper-plated, brass-plated and solid steel respectively. However, the Iraqi public, by now accustomed to using banknotes, rejected the coins and they were subsequently withdrawn from circulation.

For Sale and Wanted
If you are interested in coins from Iraq please see our product index:-
Iraqi Coins

Gold Coins
We also have gold coins from Iran on our taxfreegold website:-
Iraqi Gold Coins