Hi, all. I received a very informative answer from a colleague in
Israel, Dr. Yoav Farhi, who spoke with Tony
Goodwin and kindly wrote back to me. Here are some excerpts from
his letter.
"... this coin is Pseudo-Byzantine
SICA Type E, i.e. a relatively early
Arab-Byzantine coin.
Type E is by far the most common
type, roughly imitating the early standing emperor folles of
Constans II, and was minted in large numbers from the 640s right through to at least the 670s.
... in this case we can be a little more specific because it belongs to a group of coins - probably the product of a single
mint - which have a random selection of letters around the
reverse 'm', often supplemented by 'squiggles' and occasionally circles or crescents. The dies are quite neatly
engraved and the letters usually quite well formed, but the 'legends' are completely meaningless. A retrograde epsilon is also common.
Occasionally one can recognise remnants of the original 'ANA-NEOS'
legend, but generally it looks as if the 'mint' tried to avoid making exact copies of the
Byzantine prototype. This group was first recognised by Andrew
Oddy in an article entitled 'The
Christian coinage of early Muslim Syria' in
ARAM 15 (2003) pp. 185-196 and has come to be informally known as the 'LITOIE group' as some coins have an approximation to those letters around the
reverse 'm'. General opinion (which I would agree with) is that the group is relatively late in the Pseudo-Byzantine phase, so nearer 670 than 640, but at the moment there is no reliable dating evidence.
Andrew's title is at first sight slightly misleading as the coins are no more 'Christian' than most
Arab-Byzantine coins. But the paper was first presented at a conference on Palestinian Christianity, and I'm sure that in the mid 7thc. most coins were produced by Christians rather than Muslims.
... at the moment the location of the 'mint' is unknown. Indeed the die engravers (or their dies) may have travelled. I've seen many coins from this group over the years and interestingly from both Syria/Lebanon and
Israel, so it looks as if they circulated widely.
P.S. Your coin seems to be struck from the same dies as Cat. 3.2 in Oddy's article (see attached)."
Thanks, again, to all my friends at ForumAncientCoins. Jimi