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Tetradrachm
| Issuer | Barke |
|---|---|
| Year | 400 BC - 331 BC |
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| Composition | Log in to see details |
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| Technique | Hammered |
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| Obverse description | Three silphium plants arranged star-wise, their characteristic heart-shaped leaves and seed-pods rendered in fine relief, occupy the central field with an owl, chameleon, and jerboa filling the intervening angles. The design is enclosed within a plain border, reflecting the distinctive civic iconography of the Cyrenaican city of Barke. The silphium motif alludes to the economically vital plant for which the region was celebrated throughout the ancient world. The subsidiary creatures — owl, chameleon, and jerboa — are rendered with naturalistic detail characteristic of fourth-century Libyan Greek coinage. The ethnic legend BAPKAION appears in Greek characters around the design. |
|---|---|
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| Obverse lettering | ΒΑΡΚΑΙΩΝ |
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| Additional information |
Barke was a Cyrenaican Greek colony founded around 560 BC, and by the fifth and fourth centuries it operated with enough political autonomy to strike its own coinage independent of neighboring Cyrene. The city's minting activity was effectively terminated when Alexander the Great's campaigns reshaped North African power structures and Ptolemaic administration absorbed the region. Surviving tetradrachms attributable to Barke are genuinely scarce — the city never had Cyrene's output volume, and the roughly seventy-year window this type spans was not one of uninterrupted production.