TEHRAN - Vladimir Avanesyan-Farid, a distinguished Iranian numismatist of Armenian origin died in Tehran’s Firuzgar Hospital on Friday. He was 86.

The coin and medals collector passed away due to old age, ISNA quoted his friend and colleague Amir-Hossein Moeini as saying.

Also known as Edik, he moved to Tabriz in 1938 with his family and started working in a goldsmith shop while he was seven or eight years old, he said. 

“Working in this shop was his first encounter with coins and gold, prompting him to collect antique coins, which were no longer being minted, while he was also interested in collecting matches, stamps, banknotes, and medals.” 

Iranian scholar Ali Shahidi also said that Avanesyan-Farid was very proficient in numismatics, especially in the field of joint cultural heritage of Iran and Armenia. 

“Although he had not studied academically, he was also an expert on the history of Iranian and Armenian banknotes and stamps,” Shahidi added.
 
The use of cast-metal pieces as a medium of exchange is very ancient and probably developed out of the use in commerce of ordinary ingots of bronze and other metals that possessed an intrinsic value. Until the development of bills of exchange in medieval Europe and paper currency in medieval China, metal coins were the only such medium. Despite their diminished use in most commercial transactions, coins are still indispensable to modern economies; in fact, their importance is growing as the result of the widespread use of coin-operated machines.

In ancient times, coins were minted as a means of governmental or religious propagations and rarely as fixed means of facilitating business. Little by little, people got to find out money’s real function. Since then, people have started to exchange money for goods. Therefore, money-minting began as the production craft by the local as well as central governments.

At about 515 BC, the first Iranian coins were ordered to be minted by Darius I, the Achaemenid king. There were depicted a warrior holding a bow on the front and a quadrangular sign on the back of these coins. Since then each dynasty minted its coins through history.

ABU/AFM