With the potential for Greece to leave the Euro and all the talk of the Drachma making a return I have been thinking about currency names and what they tell us.
For example, Turkey uses the Lira, as did pre euro Italy, Lebanon for a while (still used as a slang word today) and Israel too for a time - all continuations of the roman empires Lira...of course Israel moved to the shekel, another throwback currency name!
Are there other examples of such continuation in other currencies reflecting older and more ancient borders?
Equally are there other examples of throwbacks like the shekel...perhaps a modern equivalent of the successors of Alexander the great minting coins with his head to bask in his reflected glory and legitimacy (like this one here - http://www.britishmuseum.org/explore/a_history_of_the_world/objects.aspx#31 )
The Lira has nothing to do with the Roman coins. The Romans minted coinage in the denominations of the ass, sestertius, denarius, and later the aureus. The Lira derives from the currency of early modern Parma, also called the Lira, whose name was adopted by the Sardinians in the early 19th Century, and thus the Kingdom of Italy after unification. The actual word, not the coin, derives from Latin, but has nothing to do with coins. Latin libra means "a pair of scales," but also designates a weight of a Roman pound, from which we get the abbreviation lb. Libra, though, can also mean an unspecified weight (c.f. Greek λίτρα, which also indicates an unspecified weight, and is simultaneously thr name of a coin roughly equivalent to thr obol that was used in many Sicilian colonies). So other than bearing an etymologically Latin-descended name, the Lira doesn't have much to do with thr Romans, and certainly not their coinage