kevikens

My submission is of an emperor whose images sometimes, really do capture who he was. This is an image that Shelley might have had in mind when he wrote of an emperor from an antique land, "whose frown and wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command...". Certainly Caracalla seems to have had frequent bouts of wrinkled lips and sneers of cold command. The coin is a tetradrachm of the mint of Sidon, a scarcer mint coin, and is Sear, Greek Imperial coins 2679.

Superb images of an emperor not often found with great images.

I have the book as well. You are correct. It makes a fine companion to any other books on Byzantine coinage and the coinage of the surrounding states.

IIINSTRMENTA, LATIN FOR "TOOLS" ,IMPLEMENTS THAT DO WORK. Today we look for images of tools on ancient coins (or the tools themselves). Both the Ancient Greeks and Romans developed a sophisticated technology, tools that let them do work, in the sense as work is defined in physics. Today many are amazed at how modern some of their tools seem and what the Ancients were able to do with them. So, let's see how many Ancient coins we can find that have some of the technology on this topic. To help with this, think of some of the technology they had (spinning cloth, splitting wood, forming pottery, plowing a field, making coins erecting a structure). You get the idea. I would like to ask that posters not include weapons here, tools designed to wage war. Not that warfare and weapons are not a good topic, but I'd like to keep this on tools as we normally think of tools and work. Weapons are a topic all their own and can be offered separately with many, many examples to choose from. I have on this page four example of "instruments" on coins and one actual artifact, a key (clavis) a tool for opening locks from the early Imperial period. The first coin shows a wheel (rota) that enables vehicles to move, or in the case of the potters' wheel , rotate a spindle that holds the clay being shaped. It is Sear 157. The next denarius shows Vulcan with one of the tools of the metal worker, tongs (forceps) for moving hot pieces of metal (like heated coin planchets). It is Sear 191. The small hemi drachma of Pontus, early Fourth Century BC, illustrates the anchor (ancora, same in both Latin and Greek). It is, of course, a tool designed to keep a vessel from drifting. It is Greek Sear 1655. The last coin, a big follis of Galerius, shows balance scales (libra) for weighing objects. it is Sear 3711. So, let's see what coins, or actual objects if you have them, that illustrate an aspect of work technology from that period. Now, go find some work, ancient work.

The Venetian ducat was so popular it was imitated by other medieval states. This one was put out by the Duke of Milan who had somehow acquired an interest in the Greek (Byzantine) island of Chios as a Crusader state occupation around the year 1430. It weighs just under 3.5 grams and as they were locally struck (not in Milan) they are somewhat below the expertise of the Milan Mint. From the color of the gold I also suspect some admixture of silver in the coin. It may have been issued in the name of Filipo Maria Visconti. The somewhat crude inscription reads as something like S PETRUS DVX D ME DIOLAN and SIT T:XRE QTV REGIS ISTE DUC. It may be Goldberg 3989.

I have posed my "hockey puck" next to a Ptolemaic tetradrachm of Ptolemy II to illustrate something else about these big, huge drachmas (mine weighs 73.5 grams). They are actually something unusual in anybody's system of coinage, an attempt to give bronze coinage an intrinsic metal value equal to its government stated value. Most bronze coinage is a subsidiary coinage whose metal value is usually worth quite a bit less that its government sanctioned value. It is usually a token coinage. In Roman Imperial times (or the US in its coinage history) the value of the copper of 16 assess or 100 cents did not equal the silver value of a silver denarius or in the US a silver dollar. The large, hockey puck drachmas of the Third Century BC Egypt actually had, at a silver to bronze ratio of 1:20, a bronze value of 1/4 of the Ptolemaic tetradrachm at about 14.1 grams of silver. Readers with access to a copy of Metcalf's Oxford Handbook of Greek and Roman coinage, pp.216-223 can read about this aspect of coinage. If nothing else it will bring home to readers the difficulty of making small change out of bullion precious metals, such as the absolutely tiny silver coinage of the Greeks before they turned to lesser valued metal for their subsidiary coinage. Even in older US coinage it was pretty easy to drop and lose a silver three cent piece. The same with the old English silver penny. Of course it also illustrates the difficulty of trying to make larger value coins out of lesser valued metals if one tries to make them actually the intrinsic value of what they represent. Not surprisingly this happened in Egypt as well. By the reign of Ptolemy VI the bronze drachma was reduced to a token weight of ca, 23 grams and remained at that weight for some time before dropping further.

I have an image here of an unidentified Alexandrian tetradrachm of about 250AD. I only have the obverse up here (the reverse is the common standing eagle and date L A , regnal year 1). The previous owner had it as one of Trebonianus Gallus but I have my doubts. His tetras are found only as year 3 coins. Looking at just the image I would have said Trajan Decius or maybe Valerian but I cannot make out the lettering. Any help in an exact ID much appreciated. Thanks

It is interesting that Gibbon in his all encompassing history of Rome's demise has the ROMAN empire going right up to 1453 and he was writing this in the mid 1770's.. I have read somewhere I cannot recall that as the occupants of Constantinople were lurching to oblivion in the mid 15th Century, that they themselves began to emphasize their "Greekness". If this is true, perhaps even they came to recognize that calling themselves Romans no longer made much sense. In my own teaching of history I used the term Eastern Roman Empire up to Justinian and sometimes to Heraclius, but after the Aranbconquests I introduced my students to the term Byzantine but always stressing that this term, Byzantine, has been a relatively late and artificial convention. Perhaps, oddly enough, I also use this distinction in the arrangement of my numismatic material.

Nice selection. Maybe you can start a combo. I wonder what it would sound like with a band each member playing one of these.

I wonder how many of us have coins with musical instruments on them and don't know it?

Geeze, great coins being submitted but I am getting nervous about a thread where the lyres seem to be in the majority.

Nice selection of coins.

Who is that on your coin?

Great lyre. I also wanted to take a do-over on my own carnyz coins to get better images of the Gallic battle horn. Weird instrument it is with a kind of flapping dragon's mouth. It is still played in some parts of Europe and has been mentioned in the comic strip gallic warrior series. When you hear it you will hear a sound that could not be mistaken for someone else's battle horn. In case you cannot see it, the coin on the left (Sear 157) the carnyx is just above the shield and on the denarius on the right it is sticking out from just beneath the armor. On both coins the carnyx looks like a giraffe. Of course the bottom coin is lyre of Lycia, a half drachma.

Great coins and photos of them. By the way, as I did some research on this I was surprised to discover a number of sites that said that neither Greeks nor Romans used drums in their military, either for marching armies or rowing ships. Apparently the Greeks liked to use those pipes or flutes (they had reeds in them) to keep the cadence for both matching and rowing. and that the Romans preferred calling the cadence verbally or by centurions rapping their shields with their vine sticks. I had expected to find (from watching too many Hollywoowd productions) that drums, big booming kettle drums would show up in painted images and on coins. No fiddles, either.

I have some interest in music and got to wondering about musical instruments on Greek and Roman coinage. There does not seem to be much coinage picturing Ancient musical instruments, though we know, of course that they had them. I did find a few, such as the lyre, the carnyx, several kinds of pipes, trumpets, horns, organs, tambourines (but few actual drums). Below are two Roman denarii and a quinarius, each with the Celtic carnyx, with weirdly shaped heads and a late Greco Roman lyre.. One Imperial of Julia Domna has a hard to see tympanum (looks like a small circle) in her left hand. Perhaps some members might want to check their own coinage and see if they have any musical instruments on them. I think there is a Hadrian series with the sistrum, a kind of rattle on them. if you have such coins or if you know about Ancient music or their musical instruments please wtrite and post about them. Thanks

Possibly at one time looped and subsequently damaged in the mounting or later removal.

Double striking with a slight shift of the planchet or one of the dies between the strikes.

Shanxi, well how about that?

Thanks. That was just what I was looking for. But what does OU (Greek rendering of V) APIAS mean?

Hi, guys. I need some help with an ID on this 28 mm, 11 gram bronze from a Roman Provincial mint. The coin is well worn so the inscription is only partial. I thought I could see Septimius Severus there but I don't think I have ever seen a beardless Septimius, unless the heavy wear has worn it smooth. The reverse is not much of a help either. Any ideas much appreciated. Thanks.

Excellent analysis and I agree with your conclusions and at that price this is quite a find and a bargain to boot.

One other point. What may appear as traces of silver on some of these Alexandrine coins may be traces of potin which under the right conditions can be mistaken for silver, one reason why potin came to be used on these coins, to give them a deceptive silverish appearance. I don't claim that late plating was never done on Alexandrine tetras. Indeed, I have one from Alexandria, but it is of Ptolemy I circa 300 BC and the plating was obvious. Sorry to appear skeptical about this and I will do some more research on plating rather than using an amalgam low silver alloy as the method of debasement for late Alexandrine tetradrachms.

I did see it. It may have acquired a coating of silver oxide from being stored, for centuries, within a hoard of silver coins. I would have to see other examples, several, to determine if it was applied at the mint and in ancient times.

I have never seen an Alexandrian tetradrachm from after the mid Second Century AD with any visible silvering. Actually, right from the start of these issues the silver content always seemed to be an amalgam of some silver and copper, that is the entire coin was an alloy of silver and copper (and possibly tin or lead) melted together into a grayish appearance coin which after Commodus looks pretty much like a kind of bronze. This would prove to be an interesting study and I wonder if anyone (Harl?) has done one on the composition of the metal within and throughout the core metal of these coins as opposed to their surface appearance, as there clearly has been on the Third Century increasingly debased double denarius coins. I suspect that any late tetras from Alexandria with what appears to be silvering is something done outside the mint and possibly quite recently for not well informed tourists. It is also interesting to compare the Alexandria tetradrachm with the contemporary Antioch and other Eastern mint versions of the tetradrachm. They, too, were undergoing the debasement process but having started out with more silver in the First Century AD they retained a silverish appearance, again as an amalgam rather than plating, until their discontinuance mid Third century. A worthy study for someone who would like to do some graduate work in ancient numismatic archaeology. I'll be posting pictorial example in about 20 minutes. And here they are. On the obverse images, from the left, a tetradrachm of Nero, Alexandria mint, middle is a Nero tetra from Antioch, and on the top right an Alexandrian tetra of Vespasian. The two Alexandrians are each about 16.5 % silver but the tetra from Antioch is ca. 80% silver. The second or bottom row of the obverse coins are tetradrachms of ca, 250 AD. Again bottom, from the left an Alexandrian of Trajan Decius, an Antioch tetra of Philip the Arab and on the right an Alexandrian of Gallienus from ca, 260 AD. The second set are their reverses. The Decius coin is ca, 7.5 % silver, the Gallienus is about 4%. Neither has a silvery appearance. The Antioch tetra of Phillip is 12% silver and it still has a somewhat silvery appearance. Most of these observations come from the Kenneth Harl Book, Coins in the Roman Economy, one that I heartily recommend for those interested in the fabric of Roman coinage. Bottom line for me is that the Alexandrian tetradrachms lost any appearance of being silver by the start of the Third Century, AD, whereas the Antioch tetras retained enough silver in them to give a kind of silvery image, but using an amalgam of silver, not plating, like the Roman mints double denarii chose to do. Four % silver as an amalgam is invisible silver whereas as plating a la the Roman mint coins gave them a silvery appearance, for a while, anyway.