Khosrow II

Grandson of Khosrow I Anushirvan, Khosrow II came to the throne in 590 not by inheritance but by foreign intervention: deposed within months by the usurper Bahram VI Chobin, he fled to Byzantium and was restored the following year by an army lent him by the emperor Maurice. The peace held for eleven years and broke in 602, when Maurice was murdered by the centurion Phocas; Khosrow declared the killing of his patron a casus belli and used it to open what became the longest Roman–Persian war either side fought. Between 610 and 619 his armies took Antioch, Damascus, Jerusalem (with the True Cross removed to Ctesiphon), and Alexandria. The recovery came from Heraclius's counter-invasion through the Caucasus (622–628), the defeat at Nineveh in December 627, and a palace coup in February 628 in which Khosrow's son Shiroe (Kavad II) had him imprisoned and executed within five days. The coinage is the densest single-king dataset in late-antique numismatics: regnal-year-dated drachms surviving in hundreds of thousands of specimens, struck across a mint network of unprecedented geographic reach.

Two threads carry weight beyond the reign itself. The YL-signed drachms — Sasanian silver struck inside Alexandria during the nine-year occupation of Roman Egypt between roughly 619 and 628 — are the most historically dramatic series in late-antique numismatics: a few hundred surviving specimens that document, in struck metal, the only period after the death of Cleopatra VII in 30 BC when Alexandria was not part of either a Greek or a Roman polity, and the only westward thrust of Sasanian administration ever recorded on coinage. Separately, the regnal-year dating that Kavad I had instituted, Khosrow I had systematized, and Khosrow II inherited makes this the densest precisely-dated single-ruler silver in either Roman or Persian late antiquity: every drachm carries a specific calendar year within the reign, which means specimens from year 25 (the sack of Jerusalem, AH equivalent 614) and year 33 (the start of Heraclius's counter-invasion, 622) can be lifted out of the broader output and tied to documented events in a way no Roman issue of the period permits.

Key Events

Coinage

Khosrow II struck more silver than any other Sasanian king, and probably more than any other late-antique ruler in either empire. The thirty-eight regnal years produced drachms in such volume that they remain the most abundant Sasanian coin on every modern dealer tray — a function of the long reign multiplied by the unprecedented mobilization for the Roman war, which monetized military stipends at a scale earlier Sasanian campaigns had not required. The mature drachm carries the king in profile under a winged crown surmounted by the korymbos and crescent, the beard formalised into a stylised oblong, with a Pahlavi obverse legend identifying the king as HUSRUY MLKAN MLKA AIRAN GDH ABZUT — "Khosrow, King of Kings of Iran, may his glory increase." The reverse keeps the canonical two-attendant fire-altar set inside a double dotted border, with a Pahlavi mint signature to the right of the altar and a regnal year (in numerals, also Pahlavi) to the left — every specimen precisely datable to a calendar year within the reign, which makes Khosrow II silver the most chronologically resolved coinage in late antiquity. Göbl 1971 catalogues the reign as Type II; Schindel's SNS Israel and Iran volumes are now the working die catalogues and supersede Göbl on most mint attributions. The Egyptian occupation issues signed YL (Alexandria), struck between roughly 619 and 628, sit outside this normal output entirely: a thin, scarce series produced by a Sasanian administration operating inside Roman Egypt, and the only Sasanian silver ever struck west of Antioch.

Collecting Guide

Khosrow II silver is the most-traded Sasanian coinage by volume, and the price structure organises most cleanly by mint-network depth rather than by year or grade — the differential between a Ctesiphon piece and an Alexandria YL piece is wider than the spread between VF and EF on either one. The core four mints (Ctesiphon CT, Bishapur BYŠP, Hamadan AY, Susa SWS, which between them account for the overwhelming majority of surviving output) sit in the $80–$200 band in VF and $250–$500 in EF at CNG, Roma, Künker, Stack's Bowers, and the dedicated Iranian sales at Morton & Eden. The secondary mint network of the Iranian plateau and the eastern marches (Marw MRW, Balkh BHL, Herat HL, Istakhr ST, Sakastan SK, Veh-Antiok-Khosrow VEH) sits at a modest premium of perhaps 30–80% for scarcity and for the cross-collector interest that follows Marw and Balkh into the Arab-Sasanian series. The occupation rarities — chiefly the YL-signed Alexandria silver — sit in a separate market, with Alexandria drachms regularly carrying four-figure hammers and the better-style examples climbing well past that. Regnal-year selection is the secondary axis: specimens dated to years tied to documented war events (year 25 / 614 for the sack of Jerusalem, year 33 / 622 for the start of Heraclius's counter-invasion) carry a historical-event premium that has held through recent auction cycles.

Market Overview

Khosrow II is one of the largest single-king ancient drachm markets by volume: dozens of specimens cross the major Sasanian sales every month, weighted heavily toward the core-four mints, with the YL Alexandria silver as the high-end collector focus and the eastern-mint material drawing steady cross-collector interest from the Arab-Sasanian and early-Islamic specialist field. Provenance from the named twentieth-century Sasanian cabinets (Saeedi, Mochiri, Sunrise, the Schaaf collection of Egyptian-occupation silver) carries a durable premium at the Alexandria end of the market in particular. Demand pulls from two non-Sasanian fields: biblical-history collectors who attach the year-25 drachms to the True Cross episode, and Heraclian-Byzantine specialists who collect the war as a paired series across both empires.

Related Resources

Further Reading

• Sasanidische Numismatik, Robert Göbl
• Sylloge Nummorum Sasanidarum: Israel (and the parallel SNS Iran volumes covering the late reign), Nikolaus Schindel
• Heraclius, Emperor of Byzantium, Walter E. Kaegi