Note 8 — Chapter V · HAMADAN.

As some confusion may be experienced in the matter of money terms, I may append the following table of coins:—

s. d.

(Copper) 2 pūls = 1 shahi (or shaie) or English 0 0½

” 10 shahis = 1 banabat or half-keran (silver) ” 0 5

20 shahis = 1 keran (silver) ” 0 10

10 kerans = 1 toman (tomaun), gold ” 7 6

Were the keran really tenpence, of course the tomaun would be 8s. 4d., but its value is really only ninepence at present exchange (1883). Of these coins the pūls and shahis are copper, the kerans and half-kerans or banabats silver, and the tomauns gold; though for the past fifteen years, until just recently, the tomauns (in gold) had nearly disappeared, and were merely nominal, or old coins hoarded for the sake of the purity of their gold. Prices are given indiscriminately in tomauns or kerans; the price in kerans as five hundred kerans being mostly spoken of and always written as kerans and not fifty tomauns. Till lately the tomaun has been only a name. The merchant-class, too, use the dinar, an imaginary coin (not now minted at least), as a convenient fraction for calculation.

I on arrival took my servants’ accounts in tomauns and kerans, afterwards in kerans and shaies, and at last in kerans and pūls; while an English merchant friend actually wrote his house accounts in dinars, and said it awed his servants! one thousand dinars make a keran, so one dinar is the 1/1000 of 9d.

There are no bank-notes: and in The Times telegraphic news, under the head of Persia, Friday, February 24th, 1883, is a summary of a truly Persian edict. By it the Shah informs his subjects that, “they are foolish to take dirty pieces of paper for gold and silver, and that in future all Russian Rouble notes will be confiscated!” Then follows a really useful prohibition forbidding aniline dyes, and ordering such, when imported and discovered, to be destroyed; these dyes, which are not fast, have been lately much used by ignorant carpet-weavers in Persia.