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Obol
| Issuer | Uncertain Philistian city |
|---|---|
| Year | 450 BC - 333 BC |
| Type | Standard circulation coin |
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| Obverse description | Helmeted head of Athena in right profile, rendered in the Athenian style with a frontal eye characteristic of archaic and early classical coinage. The goddess wears a crested Attic helmet decorated with a pi-style palmette flanked by three olive leaves on the bowl. The die work reflects the local Philistian adaptation of Athenian prototypes, with slightly cruder engraving typical of peripheral mint production. |
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| Reverse script | Greek |
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| Additional information |
Philistian civic coinage of this period remains one of the more contested areas of ancient numismatics — the issuing city for this type is unresolved, with Gaza, Ashkelon, and several smaller centers all proposed at various points. These tiny silver fractions circulated in a coastal zone heavily trafficked by Phoenician merchants, Greek traders, and Achaemenid administrative personnel simultaneously, which explains the wildly eclectic iconographic borrowing visible across the series as a whole.
Gitler and Tal's exhaustive 2006 corpus brought systematic order to what had been a chaotic field, separating issues previously lumped together under vague "Philisto-Arabian" attributions.