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Nomos
| Issuer | Siris and Pyxos |
|---|---|
| Year | 520 BC |
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| Currency | As |
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| Obverse description | Bull standing left in high relief, head reverted to face the viewer, rendered with fine archaic artistry including carefully incised parallel lines delineating the mane and musculature. A dotted exergual line separates the figure from the exergue, within which appears the retrograde legend MIPI. To the left of the bull in the field, the inscription MON is visible in archaic Greek letters, enclosed within a beaded border characteristic of early South Italian coinage. |
|---|---|
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| Reverse description | Incuse mirror image of the obverse type, featuring a bull standing left with head reverted, struck in deep relief intaglio as was standard for early South Italian nomoi employing the Pythagorean incuse technique. The exergual area below a dotted groundline contains the legend ΠV+, identifying the issuing city of Pyxos. To the right of the incuse bull figure, the partial legend OEM is discernible within the recessed field, framed by a rope-pattern border. |
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| Additional information |
Siris, a Achaean colony on the Gulf of Taranto, was violently destroyed around 530 BC by a coalition of neighboring Greek cities — Metapontion, Sybaris, and Kroton — who resented its commercial reach. What survived was absorbed into a new settlement, Pyxos, with the surviving population retaining enough civic identity to strike coinage under the hyphenated authority recorded here. This nomos is therefore not merely early; it postdates a documented act of inter-colonial warfare and reflects a suppressed polis reasserting itself through the one medium that announced legitimate civic existence.