What is "danake"

The danake or danace ( Greek: ) was a small silver coin of the Persian Empire ( Old Persian dânake), equivalent to the Greek obol and circulated among the eastern Greeks. Later it was used by the Greeks in other metals. The 2nd-century grammarian Julius Pollux gives the name as danikê or danakê or danikon and says that it was a Persian coin, but by Pollux's time this was an anachronism.

The term as used by archaeologists is vague in regard to denomination. A single coin buried with the dead and made of silver or gold is often referred to as a danake and presumed to be a form of Charon's obol. Numismatists have also found the danake an elusive coin to identify, speculating that the Greeks used the term loosely for a demonetized coin of foreign origin.

In Persia, the danake was originally a unit of weight for bulk silver, representing one-eighth of a shekel (1.05 gm). This use of the word became obsolete. In the Hellenistic period and later it designated the silver Attic obol, which originally represented the sixth part of a drachma; in New Persian dâng means "one sixth".