500 Dram Armenian Alphabet - Զ

Part of the Central Bank of Armenia's 38-coin series dedicated to the Armenian alphabet, each piece commemorating a single letter devised by Mesrop Mashtots around 405 AD. The alphabet's creation was explicitly political — the Armenian church needed scriptures in a native script to resist Syriac and Greek ecclesiastical dominance, and within a year of its invention, the Bible had been translated in full.

Զ is the sixth letter, representing the /z/ sound, and derives ultimately from the Greek zeta through Mashtots's systematic adaptation.