Gaza occupied a uniquely strategic position on the overland trade route connecting Egypt to the Levant, and its civic coinage reflects that — these small silvers were struck under Achaemenid Persian suzerainty, with the city exercising unusual local autonomy in its minting decisions. The Philistian issues are among the most stylistically eclectic coinages of the ancient world, freely borrowing from Athenian, Egyptian, and Persian visual vocabularies simultaneously.
Gitler and Tal's corpus, published in 2006, was the first systematic cataloguing of this material and remains the definitive reference. Many specimens entered the scholarly record only through controlled excavations at Ashkelon and Tel Mikhal.
Gaza occupied a uniquely strategic position on the overland trade route connecting Egypt to the Levant, and its civic coinage reflects that — these small silvers were struck under Achaemenid Persian suzerainty, with the city exercising unusual local autonomy in its minting decisions. The Philistian issues are among the most stylistically eclectic coinages of the ancient world, freely borrowing from Athenian, Egyptian, and Persian visual vocabularies simultaneously.
Gitler and Tal's corpus, published in 2006, was the first systematic cataloguing of this material and remains the definitive reference. Many specimens entered the scholarly record only through controlled excavations at Ashkelon and Tel Mikhal.