Armenian dram sign

The Armenian dram sign (֏, image: ; Armenian: Դրամ; code: AMD) is the currency sign of the Armenian dram. In Unicode, it is encoded at U+058F ֏ armenian dram sign (HTML ֏).

After its proclamation of independence, Armenia put into circulation its own national currency – Armenian Dram, the usage of which revealed the necessity for a monetary sign. As the result of common business practice and the unique pattern of Armenian letters the shape of the sign and its variations appeared in the business scratches. Since that time and until the official endorsement of the sign a number of artists and businessmen developed and offered various shapes for it. Now the Sign (Dram symbol) is present in the Armenian standard for the national characters and symbols and in the Armenian computer fonts.

History

Heritage of Mashtots

There is a strong belief that the shape of Dram Sign (symbol) is a direct projection of the Armenian alphabet – the work of Mesrop Mashtots. It is not hard to notice the clean-cut geometry of the Armenian letters, so did the author of the Sign when studied the alphabet. Later he became a proponent for the hypothesis, which states that the prototype of the Armenian alphabet is a variety of combinations of the resembling curves and the horizontal elements. Subsequently these horizontal elements played a key role in the Sign development.

Armenian dram

The dram (Armenian: Դրամ; sign: ; code: AMD) is the monetary unit of Armenia. It is subdivided into 100 luma (Armenian: լումա). The word "dram" translates into English as "money" and is cognate with the Greek drachma and the Arabic dirham. The first instance of a dram currency was in the period from 1199 to 1375, when silver coins called dram were issued.

History

On 21 September 1991, a national referendum proclaimed Armenia as an independent republic from the Soviet Union. The Central Bank of Armenia, established on 27 March 1993, was given the exclusive right of issuing the national currency.

In the immediate aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union attempts were made to maintain a common currency (the Russian ruble) among CIS states. Armenia joined this rublezone. However it soon became clear that maintaining a currency union in the unstable political and economical circumstances of the post-Soviet states would be very difficult. The rublezone effectively collapsed with the unilateral monetary reform in Russia, 1993. As result the states that were still participating (Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Moldova, Armenia and Georgia) were 'pushed out' and forced to introduce separate currencies. Armenia was one of the last countries to do so when it introduced the dram on 22 November 1993.