Ariarathes IV or V?

[Altamura]

Recently I again came across these Cappadocian bronze coins overstruck on serrate seleucids:
https://www.acsearch.info/search.html?id=6215576
https://www.acsearch.info/search.html?id=5612592
https://www.acsearch.info/search.html?id=3712832     (there are some more)
They used to be quite scarce, but in the last two or three years some more appeared on the market.

In his article "The Classification of Cappadocian Coins", NC 7/9 1969, pp. 21-31 (not available online), Otto Mørkholm had attributed this type to Ariarathes IV, mainly because a specimen in the collection of the ANS is overstruck on a serrate coin of Seleukos IV. Mørkholm refers for the undertype to SNG Cop 174-75, which is corresponding to SC 1315: http://numismatics.org/sco/id/sc.1.1315

The reign of Seleukos IV has been between 187 and 175 BC, falling into the reign of Ariarathes IV from 220 to 163 BC.
The coin Mørkholm described is only poorly pictured in the NC article, in the ANS collection online it is listed (http://numismatics.org/collection/1944.100.62315), but without picture. So the overstrike cannot really be retraced.

In the more recent coin descriptions on acsearch these coins are now attributed to Ariarathes V and referred to HGC 7, 813 (see the links above) where I don't have access to.

Does anybody know where this new attribution to Ariarathes V comes from and which are the arguments for it?

Regards

Altamura

[Pekka K]

Hoover writes: "Uncertain Kappadokian mint, Struck c. 158 - 130 BC.
Simonetta 1977, p. 48, nos. 5a - 5b (Uncertain)."

Pekka K

[Altamura]

... Hoover writes: "Uncertain Kappadokian mint, Struck c. 158 - 130 BC.
Simonetta 1977, p. 48, nos. 5a - 5b (Uncertain)." ...

Thank you!
But what Hoover is writing doesn't sound to be a sound reasoning   . Just tossing some numbers in the air is perhaps not convincing  .

Simonetta 1977 is the book "The Coins of the Cappadocian Kings" by Bono Simonetta. There he tends to attribute this coin to Ariarathes X, reigning between 42 and 36 BC. But this is certainly too late for systematic overstrikes on seleucid serrates.

Regards

Altamura

[Altamura]

Perhaps I have now an idea from where this attribution to Ariarathes V might come  .

In an older article ("Some Cappadocian Die-Links", NC 4 (1964), pp. 21-25) O. Mørkholm makes some remarks about this coin type as well. Already here he gives it to Ariarathes IV, see page 23:
https://www.docdroid.net/htTOvz6/8469-pdf#page=5

But additionally he cites in footnote 3 Dorothy Hannah Cox, "A Tarsus Coin Collection in The Adana Museum", NNM 92 (1941), where this coin type is described on page 55-56 as number 225: https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015009096846&view=image&seq=497

Cox also considers these coins as overstrikes on Seleukos IV. But she argues that Nike has been appeared on Cappadocian coins first on the coinage of the ursurper Orophernes and that after Ariarathes V had defeated Orophernes in 157 BC he "may have retaliated by adopting the same type".
It is a bit strange that Mørkholm doesn't mention this consideration and does not cite Cox again in his later article.

I cannot follow the argument by Cox (strange kind of revenge  ), but perhaps from here comes the dating c. 158 - 130 BC for this coin type.
Besides of that I doubt that it was possible, nearly twenty years after the death of Seleukos IV, to collect enough specimens of these special serrate coins to overstrike them. It probably would have been easier to produce new flans  .

As a whole this emission seems very interesting and mysterious to me. Why does a Cappadocian ruler produce a coin type solely as overstrike over a single coin type (or perhaps two, the weights and sizes vary a bit) from another ruler .

Some more ideas about that are welcome  .

Regards

Altamura

[dwarf]

Cappadocian rulers usually struck bronze coin on "normal" flans
Question: What is the reason for serrated-edge coins on Syrian bronzes? (I know that your knowledge here is better than mine)
Next question: Is it possible to make a tie because of these serrates?

Grettings
Dwarf

[Altamura]

... Question: What is the reason for serrated-edge coins on Syrian bronzes? (I know that your knowledge here is better than mine) ...

Good question, but I fear nobody's knowledge here is better than your's  .

You always read that serrated Seleucid coins have been some sort of fashion (the truth is probably that nobody has a reasonable idea to explain it  ).
See e.g. in  O. Mørkholm , "Early Hellenistic Coinage from the Accession of Alexander the Great to the Peace of Apamea", Cambridge 1991, on page 13:
https://books.google.de/books?id=U_5Ez0kAOuIC&lpg=PA13&ots=RoCFYxU76r&dq=seleucid%20serrate%20coins&hl=de&pg=PA13#v=onepage&q=phenomenon&f=false
He writes "It was definitely produced during the casting of the flan and is most probably to be regarded as a result of fashion, occasionally employed at certain  Seleucid and Macedonian mints and then quietly discarded.".

Somewhere I found that in an appendix of the second part of A. Houghton & C. Lorber, "Seleucid Coins: A Comprehensive Catalog" (I don't have access to that), Oliver Hoover does write about these serrated coins. But I fear that if he would have had an ingenious explanation of the phenomenon we would have heard about it  .

... Next question: Is it possible to make a tie because of these serrates? ...

There are family ties between Ariarathes IV and the Seleucids. His mother Stratonike was a daughter of Antiochos II and his wife Antiochis a daughter of Antiochos III.
So he was perhaps not forced to collect his flans on the market but could get some bags of them directly from the source  . But why then overstriking?

By the way, there is also a smaller denomination on overstruck serrated flans with a bull and a bow in bowcase: https://www.acsearch.info/search.html?id=6215575
(but these seem to be minted sometimes on flans with plain edges).

Regards

Altamura