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Tetradrachm Kugelreiter Type
| Issuer | West Noricum |
|---|---|
| Year | 200 BC - 1 BC |
| Type | Standard circulation coin |
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| Reverse description | A horseman — the so-called Kugelreiter or 'ball rider' — depicted riding left atop a stylized horse, rendered in the highly abstract La Tène Celtic style. The rider's body is reduced to a globular, spherical mass with schematic limbs, seated upon a prancing horse whose legs terminate in pellet-and-crescent hooves and whose mane and tail are rendered as wavy lines. A cluster of pellets appears above the horse's back in the upper field, with an additional small symbol visible in the right field. The composition fills the irregular flan with characteristic Celtic dynamism and abstraction. |
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| Mintage | ND (200 BC - 1 BC) |
| Additional information |
The "Kugelreiter" (ball-rider) type belongs to the Celtic silver coinage produced by tribes occupying the eastern Alpine region, an area the Romans would eventually designate as the province of Noricum. These coins derive ultimately from the Philip II tetradrachm tradition, but by the time this type was being struck the prototype had been abstracted beyond recognition through generations of stylistic drift — a process numismatists sometimes call "devolution" though it arguably reflects deliberate local aesthetic choices rather than degradation.
Kostial's corpus remains the principal reference for Norican Celtic coinage. Attribution to "West Noricum" is a modern scholarly convention based on find-spot distribution, not any ancient political designation.