The
attribution of a couple of Akarnanian coins is giving me some trouble.
There's a nice little series of denominated Akarnanian coins consisting of
drachm,
triobol and
diobol types.
The
triobol was listed as federal coinage (possibly Stratos
mint) by the
auction house. At the time I didn't really dig into it very much until recently when I acquired the
drachm as well, but attributed to Herakleia this time.
It seemed rather strange that these two similar
types would come from different mints, so I checked my references at hand.
BCD Akarnania also lists the
drachm under Herakleia, but the
triobol under the
uncertain mint section.
HGC on the other hand connects all three
types to Alyzeia, saying: 'Abbreviated Greek legends (ΔΡΑ,ΤΡΙ,ΔΙΟ) identify the
denominations, but in the absence of a city
ethnic these coins were long attributed to an obscure Akarnanian city called Herakleia. Recent
work has shown that Alyzeia with its prominent cult of
Herakles is a much better
choice of
mint.'
Unfortunately this '
Recent work' is left unspecified.
Then there is also the other problem of the '
digamma/Acheloos' coins. This was again listed as Federal coinage, but the references seem to disagree again.
BCD mentions: 'the coins with Digamma that were once attributed to Oiniadai are today generally attributed to Stratos as the federal
mint'
Historia Numorum agrees: 'For the silver coins with the digamma (F) ... formerly attributed to Oeniadae, see Stratus.'
However
HGC basically says the
reverse: '
A recent study has convincingly argued that several
drachm emissions formerly treated as federal issues of the Akarnanian League struck at Stratos in the late 4th century BC are actually coins of Oiniadai.'
To make things more complicated,
HGC also lists similar F/acheloos
types under Anaktorion.
Don't get me wrong, I really like the
HGC reference series, but it's so frustrating there never are any references to these '
recent studies'...
At least it does mention the gist of the latter study; that we don't have any attestation of
Akarnania being written with digamma, but we do for Oiniadai and Anaktorion.
Did anyone by any chance stumble upon any
recent studies of Akarnanian coins that I could look into?
Thanks