Phoenician commerce must have been much helped by these arrangements, which facilitated rapid communication, gave security to lines of route which had been previously infested with robbers, and provided resting-places for the companies of merchants and traders, not unlike the caravanserai of modern Turkey and Persia.
Darius also established throughout his vast empire a uniform coinage, based apparently on that which had previously prevailed in Lydia.
His "darics," as they were called by the Greeks, were, in the first instance, gold coins of a rude type, a little heavier than our sovereigns, weighing between 123 and 124 grains troy.[14271] They bore the figure of an archer on the obverse, and on the reverse a very rough and primitive _quadratum incusum_.

Darius must have coined them in vast abundance, since early in the reign of his successor a single individual of no great eminence had accumulated as many as 3,993,000 of them.[14272] Subsequently to the introduction of the gold darics, a silver coinage was issued, originally (we are told) in Egypt by a Persian satrap called Aryandes,[14273] but afterwards by the central government.

The name of "daric" was extended to these coins also, which, however, were much larger and heavier than the gold coins, weighing as much as 235 grains, and corresponding to the Greek tetradrachm, and (nearly) to the Hebrew shekel.

The establishment of this excellent circulating medium, and the wide extension which it almost immediately attained, must have given an enormous stimulus to trade, and have been found of the greatest convenience by the Phoenician merchants, who had no longer to carry with them the precious metal in bars or ingots, and to weigh their gold and silver in the balance in connection with every purchase that they made, but could effect both sales and purchases in the simple and commodious manner still in use among all civilised nations at the present day.
Under these circumstances we can well understand that the Phoenicians were thoroughly satisfied with the position which they occupied under the earlier Persian kings, and strove zealously to maintain and extend the empire to which they owed so much.

Their fidelity was put to a crucial test after they had been subjects of Darius Hystaspis for a little more than twenty years, and had had about fourteen or fifteen years' experience of the advantages of his governmental system.
Aristagoras of Miletus, finding himself in a position of difficulty, had lighted up the flames of war in Asia Minor, and brought about a general revolt of the Greeks in those parts against the Persian power--a revolt which spread on from the Greeks to the native Asiatics, and in a short time embraced, not only Ionia and AEolis, but Caria, Caunus, and almost the whole of Cyprus.[14274] The bulk of the Cyprian cities were Phoenician colonies, and the political connection between these cities and Phoenicia was so close and of such ancient date that the Phoenicians can scarcely have failed to be moved by their example and by their danger.