Catalog
See full images - free registration
Continue with Google - no registration!
or register with email
Why register? Just to keep bots out of our catalog. Your email stays private - we will never share it or send you anything uninvited. We guarantee you that!
Drachm
| Issuer | Uncertain Philistian city |
|---|---|
| Year | 450 BC - 333 BC |
| Type | Log in to see details |
| Value | Log in to see details |
| Currency | Log in to see details |
| Composition | Log in to see details |
| Weight | Log in to see details |
| Diameter | Log in to see details |
| Thickness | Log in to see details |
| Shape | Round (irregular) |
| Technique | Log in to see details |
| Orientation | Log in to see details |
| Engraver(s) | Log in to see details |
| In circulation to | Log in to see details |
| Reference(s) | Log in to see details |
| Obverse description | Bare male head facing right, rendered in fine archaic Greek style with distinctly oriental character, the hair dressed in closely cropped wavy locks arranged in rows across the crown and nape. The facial features are finely modelled with a prominent aquiline nose, strong jaw, and slightly parted lips suggestive of an idealized ruler or deity portrait. The bust is set within a guilloche-pattern border encircling the field. The style reflects the Philistian coinage tradition of blending Athenian artistic influence with Near Eastern iconographic conventions. |
|---|---|
| Obverse script | Log in to see details |
| Obverse lettering | Log in to see details |
| Reverse description | Forepart of a lion advancing to the right, depicted in high relief with open jaws, confronting the hindquarters of a second lion facing left, creating a symmetrical heraldic composition. Below the lions, a bearded male face and neck are rendered inverted, a distinctive Philistian iconographic element. The entire design is contained within a dotted square border, itself set within a recessed incuse square formed by the hammered strike. The composition reflects strong Persian and Egyptian artistic influences characteristic of southern Levantine coinage of the fifth to fourth centuries BC. |
| Reverse script | Log in to see details |
| Reverse lettering | Log in to see details |
| Edge | Log in to see details |
| Mint | Log in to see details |
| Mintage | Log in to see details |
| Additional information |
Philistian coinage of the fifth and fourth centuries BC occupies one of the more contested corners of ancient numismatics — struck by cities along the southern Levantine coast during the Persian period, these pieces drew simultaneously from Athenian, Egyptian, and Phoenician visual vocabularies, producing a hybrid coinage with no direct parallel. The issuing city for this type remains unresolved; Gitler and Tal's exhaustive 2006 corpus brought systematic die-linkage analysis to bear on the problem without producing consensus attributions for every group.
The series ends abruptly with Alexander's campaigns of 333–332 BC and the destruction of Gaza.