It's one of the cruder (and usually underweight)
star and
anchor prutot of
Jannaeus, often termed 'widows' mites'. I have a quarrel with the term, starting with the fact that 'mite' is an old translation of 'lepton', and these are the wrong
denomination!
The interesting thing is that
Jannaeus started
his reign issuing the typical
Hasmonean prutot, with the
inscription 'Yehonatan the High Priest and the Council of the Jews' in archaic Hebrew lettering, and two
cornucopiae and a pomegranate on the
reverse. Then he stopped minting those, and struck very large numbers of coins in
his sole name as
king, with a Greek
inscription on the
obverse, and Aramaic on the
reverse. Then he went back to the original
type, with an abbreviated form of
his name.
He ruled as a
king on the Greek model, and doesn't appear to have taken
his High Priestly duties too seriously. That's probably linked with the way he started striking as
King, rather than as High Priest. He went too far, fought a civil war with the Pharisees, and eventually negotiated a
peace. Returning to the traditional coin
type looks like one of the compromises associated with that.
