In 539 BC Cyrus peacefully took possession of Babylon, and the kingdom of Iranian peoples, taken over by the Achaemenian dynasty from the Medes, expanded to become the first real world-empire of ancient history. Under the Seleucids and the Parthians the site of the Mesopotamian capital moved a little to the north on the Tigris to Seleucia and Ctesiphon. When Alexander the Great at last halted his victorious march, the eastern frontier of the Achaemenian kingdom, he saw as the final goal of his desires the rebuilding of Babylon. Parthian art or Mesopotamian art of the Arsacid period worked with borrowed elements of Greek fashion, but these quickly lost their essential character. The drama of the foundation of a new world-religion, which shook both the Christian west and Zoroastrian Iran, was also enacted in Mesopotamia. It was the assimilation of ancient oriental culture into the Achaemenian empire and its Iranian successor states that first gave "Babylonism" the vast world-historical pers.

The Achaemenian, Arsacid and Sasanian dynasties, which together ruled Iran for more than a millennium, their coinages are an invaluable source of information about the history, culture and economic life of the Sasanian state. The alteration in Sasanian numismatic portraiture stems from Iranian national tradition; such changes reflect a rejection of the Arsacid dynasty and all it stood for a deliberate challenge to the old enemy Rome. As regards weight-standard and choice of denominations, the Sasanians at first kept strictly to existing traditions. The silver drachm of Attic weight, which even in Parthian times was everywhere the commonest currency, became the chief denomination of the Sasanian state. The formulation of Sasanian coin inscriptions is determined by the political and religious motives of the dynasty. The coin inscriptions are in Sasanian Pahlavi (Middle Persian) and, in isolated instances, ideograms are used. The problems of Sasanian numismatic art are closely connected with those of technology.