American Corner Yerevan

Lecture about Monetary Signs

2:00pm 15.10.2008

On October 15, 2008 the Yerevan American Corner organized a public presentation in the framework of “Armenians at the American Corner.” The public lecture was entitled “Monetary Symbols of the U.S. Dollar, Armenian Dram and the Euro,” a three part Power Point presentation by Karen Komedaryan.

The speaker first spoke about the history of the monetary signs, referring to the Spanish-Mexican peso, and the other popular explanation that the dollar sign derives from the Spanish coat of arms engraved on the Spanish colonial silver coins. Mr. Komendaryan added his own guesses from where the symbol came from.

The second part of his presentation included the history of Euro, about the symbol, when and how it was created and what the two lines mean.

The last part of lecture was about Armenian dram symbol. It was adopted in 2001 as a state symbol of Armenian Dram although now it is only seen on the 10.000 AMD note. The speaker was one of the two authors of the symbol who suggested this design to the president of Armenia in 2001.

About 27 members were present at the lecture including experts from the Central Bank of Armenia, different NGOs and students. After the lecture, a one hour discussion took place.