Ephesos or Arados?

[Altamura]

... (I am still getting my head around the fact that a contemporary imitation is seen as genuine, or, at least not as bad as a modern fake, although the fact it actually is ancient is intriguing) ...

This is a fascinating subject, where you have ancient fakes, ancient imitations and probably a mixture of the two.

Ancient fakes did exist since the invention of coinage. There have been people who made a profit by producing coins where the intrinsic metal value has not been as it looked like. The aim was making the fakes looking exactly like the originals:
https://www.acsearch.info/search.html?id=6925984
https://www.acsearch.info/search.html?id=1341220
https://www.acsearch.info/search.html?id=6437660

Imitations are usually made of the same metal as their originals, but often with a lower content of precious metals (if made of silver or gold). They very often have been produced to overcome a local shortage in coined money in regions where no own money was minted and the money used came from somewhere else. Very often these coins did not even try to deceive their users, you see immediately that these are no originals. But sometimes it is hard to decide whether a coinage is an imitation or should be considered a new original creation.
The state of research about such imitations is different. There is quite a lot of literature about imitations of Athenian owls, but only very few about imitative bronze coinage from the Balkans.
See e.g. Peter van Alfen, "Problems in ancient imitative and counterfeit coinage": https://tinyurl.com/yy4qc39d

Here are some examples of interesting or famous imitations:
https://www.acsearch.info/search.html?id=6557387
https://www.acsearch.info/search.html?id=7670595
https://www.acsearch.info/search.html?id=5243203
https://www.acsearch.info/search.html?id=7387044
https://www.acsearch.info/search.html?id=734105
https://www.acsearch.info/search.html?id=6993913

If you want you can see a large part of the "celtic" coinage of the Balkans as imitative .

At the end it is up to you how to judge these ancient imitations and fakes. I personally find them very fascinating and they have their place in my collection .

Regards

Altamura

[Anaximander]

I am not quite sure what you are referring in regards to alliance coinage (do you mean; shared iconographic elements) ?

You are of course entitled to your own opinion but the blundered palm tree, unusual combination of letters (monogram/era date) suggest contemporary imitation. I very much doubt whether the workshops of both Ephesos or Arados would have allowed such inferior dies, surely there would have been strict quality checks.

Martin

The alliance between Ephesos and Arados was (allegedly) a formal and enduring one. Yes, there was intentional sharing of iconography on some of their coinage.  How do we know this? a bee-keeper blog, of course!

<<In 202 BCE, Ephesus established an alliance with the Phoenician city of Arados (now Arwad, a small island off the Syrian coast south of Tartus). Arados later marked this event by adopting the bee and stag design for its coinage[12]. Coins of Arados can be distinguished by the name of city ARADION, inscribed in Greek on the reverse. This alliance evidently continued for decades.>>

I wasn't suggesting the thread's coin to be an alliance coin, just my own, hence the confusion on its attribution. I agree with others here that the subject coin is a likely contemporary imitation.

[Altamura]

Even after having found what you are citing here (https://www.beeculture.com/catch-the-buzz-ancient-coins-were-adorned-with-honey-bees-honored-almost-magical/) I'm not convinced  .

The footnote number 12 which perhaps should confirm this alliance doesn't exist  .

In the above mentioned article by Philip Kinns such an alliance is not mentioned (as OldMoney already has written above). In contrary, he writes "The Aradian dated drachms in Ephesian types should accordingly be seen as a purely imitative series, inaugurated in 171/70 BC after Ephesus itself had effectively ceased production."

Regards

Altamura

[Anaximander]

Altamura: Thanks for clarifying that point.  An alliance is not confirmed by evidence.  We do know that Arados issued coins almost identical to a type of Ephesus, and we have seen conjecture of an alliance.  Barclay Head, in Historia Nummorum and in his History of the Coinage of Ephesus (Pd. X. 202-133 BC, Alliance between Ephesus and Aradus), mentions as much:

<<In B.C. 202 Arados in Phoenicia began to strike Alexandrine tetradrachms (Müller, Cl. V) bearing dates in Greek characters. Similar coins without dates began to be issued at Ephesus about the same time. This coincidence seems to indicate that Ephesus and Arados, two great commercial cities of the coasts of Asia Minor and Phoenicia respectively, may have found it to their mutual advantage about this time to conclude a monetary treaty, according to which each city might secure a free circulation for her coins on the markets of the other. This, of course, is only a conjecture, but it is remarkable that, at both cities, the Alexandrine tetradrachms of Müller 's Class V merge into those of Class VI (Müller, Nos. 1018-1024) about B.C. 198, and that the autonomous drachms of Attic weight issued at Ephesus during the greater part of the second century are also identical in type with the drachms of Aradus dated 174-110 B.C.>>.

I shared the bee-keeper blog in a lighthearted way; it was reprinting an article from Coinweek, and the source has its notes listed.  The note in question, #12, is a reference to a sale catalog lot with a bee drachm of Arados much like my own.