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Onkia

Issuer Eryx (Sicily)
Year 400 BC - 340 BC
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Orientation Variable alignment ↺
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Obverse description Bare head of a local nymph in profile facing right, rendered in a restrained archaic-to-early-classical Sicilian style. The hair is drawn back and bound with a taenia, with wavy locks framing the face. Delicate earrings and a necklace are indicated at the neck. The field is unadorned and uninscribed, typical of Elymian bronze coinage of this period.
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Edge Plain
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Additional information

Eryx was a Elymian city perched atop Monte San Giuliano in western Sicily, stubbornly non-Greek in character despite centuries of Hellenic pressure from the coast. Its bronze coinage of this period reflects a city caught between Carthaginian dominance and sporadic Syracusan intervention — Dionysius I seized Eryx around 397 BC, and the city changed hands repeatedly over the following decades. The onkia denomination, the twelfth-part of a litra, was the smallest unit in the Sicilian bronze system and rarely survived in collectible condition given its size and the region's acidic soils.

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