Praefectus Posted August 3 · Member Share Posted August 3 3 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
TIF Posted August 3 · Supporter Share Posted August 3 Hmm, nope, and I thought it would be an easy find 🤣. I ran the same searches you probably already tried (filleted bull facing AE, with and without "Artemis" and other female deities) and didn't find anything that size the looked like a match. What can you read from the reverse legend, and is there any obverse legend that you can discern? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Praefectus Posted August 3 · Member Author Share Posted August 3 The only reverse lettering visible is T(?) A N O. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Deinomenid Posted August 3 · Supporter Share Posted August 3 For TANO there's supposedly only one possibility, Paestum/Poseidonia. ΠΑΙSΤΑΝΟ For ANO there are more, but nothing obvious stood out. Here's the list. You read from the partial word in bold on the right back to the bold lettering on the left. (Bronze bull heads says Crete to me, especially for obscure coins, but I didn't see anything.) 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Benefactor Phil Davis Posted August 3 · Benefactor Benefactor Share Posted August 3 (edited) I agree with TIF, this seems straightforward but turns out to be anything but. I keep coming back to the quite similar filleted bucranium on certain coins of Elateia in Phokis. Something like this: (CNG E281, lot 69; 17mm, 4.98g) or this: (Agora 54, lot 27; 18.2mm, 6.13g.) These depict Apollo of course, not his sister, but Artemis does regularly appear on the silver triobols of the Phokian League, paired with a facing bull's head (sans fillets:) (Nomos 33, lot 1159; 13mm, 3.82g.) It's not too much of a stretch to suggest that a small bronze issue of one of the constituent cities of the league (or the league itself) might have combined Artemis (albeit of a very different style) with a filleted head as on the OP coin. (The free-floating O under Artemis' chin on the silver coin, akin to the O to the right of the head on the OP piece, is probably a coincidence... but maybe not.) The difficulty of course is the reverse inscription, However one reads that, it seems to make no sense for the Phokian League or one of its cities. I suppose we'd have to resort to "unknown magistrate" or something like that if my suggestion is to be viable. (I toyed with the notion that the mystery piece was overstruck and the inscription is the remains of an undertype, but that seems unreasonably far-fetched.) For visual convenience, here again is the OP coin: Edited August 3 by Phil Davis 3 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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