A second, less well preserved specimen of the same coin of
Caracalla at Edessa, from the same die pair, was recently sold by
London Ancient Coins, e-auction L, 26 March 2014, lot 104: see picture below. Their cataloguer cited the
CNG specimen, which can be found in
CoinArchives Pro as well as CNG's Research database, and he or she also took over CNG's description of the
reverse type.
Having acquired this second coin, I was puzzled by the details of the
reverse type. Small figures of deities on columns appear quite often in the background of
reverse types of
Roman imperial and
provincial coins, but it seemed odd (a) to have
two deities on columns, (b) that the deities were
reclining, an uncomfortable and precarious posture for a figure on top of a
column, and (c) that the columns
had converging sides ("pyramidal shaped") rather than parallel sides. Maybe these "columns" were actually waterfalls, fitting with the placement of reclining
river gods at their summits?
Bingo! Edessa is situated where a river flows out of the mountains onto the Macedonian plain, and the city has
numerous waterfalls! Below, from the city's current website, are pictures of Edessa's two principal waterfalls as they exist today, the first one a single and the second one a double waterfall. These may be the identical waterfalls depicted on the coin: note that the waterfall on the left has only a single stream of water, slanting slightly to the right as it descends, while the waterfall on the right has two streams, one slanting slightly left and the other slightly right! The standing deity pulling her drapery over her
head (to protect herself from the spray?) will be the city goddess, accompanied by the city's animal, the
goat, as on other coins too, for example the one of
Severus Alexander that I show in my last post. That Edessa
had a prominent waterfall was mentioned by the second-century sophist
Aelius Aristides: " I lay ill in Edessa close to the waterfall, and with difficulty reached
Rome twenty days after leaving
home."
I wonder if there are other
ancient coins depicting waterfalls, but don't seem to have any books in my
library where I could easily look that up!
