Catalog
1/4 Shekel
| Issuer | Ashdod (Cities of Philistia) |
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| Year | 450 BC - 333 BC |
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| Orientation | Variable alignment ↺ |
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| Obverse description | Facing head of a bearded male deity or ruler shown in three-quarter view to the left, wearing a crested helmet, with carefully rendered hair and a prominent ear visible; a forepart of a lion or leonine creature appears to the right of the head, its open jaws depicted in profile. The design is deeply struck in a bold, archaic style reflecting strong Persian and Phoenician artistic influence. The entire composition is contained within a square incuse punch divided into quadrants, a characteristic feature of early Philistian coinage. The field shows the rough, irregular surface typical of hammered silver issues of the fifth and fourth centuries BC. |
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| Reverse script | Aramaic |
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| Additional information |
Philistine civic coinage emerged in the fifth century BC under Achaemenid Persian suzerainty, with cities like Ashdod granted enough administrative autonomy to strike their own fractions for local commerce. These issues served the tax and tribute economy the Persians imposed across the Levant, and their design vocabulary drew heavily on Athenian, Egyptian, and Phoenician sources simultaneously — a numismatic record of a culture sitting at a crossroads of empires rather than generating one.
The Gitler & Tal corpus, published in 2006, was the first systematic classification of these issues. Prior to that work, many Philistian fractions circulated through the scholarly literature unattributed or misattributed to Gaza.