Somewhere on an old computer is an incomplete article I wrote in 2001 or early 2002 about these "Nektanebo" bronzes. There was also an email I sent to
Eric McFadden outlining my arguments but I'm sure that doesn't exist anymore.
I will try to recap what I can remember.
Up until the late 90's these were very
rare. In 1995
Weiser in
his catalog of the Koln
Collection of
Ptolemaic bronzes cataloged one that he called unpublished. This was the first time that these were referred to a coins of Nektanebo and the
attribution is based on the similarity of the
scales on the bronze to the
scales that appear on the gold staters that are attributed to Nektanebo. They aren't published in
Svoronos, not in Copenhagen and not in any other
Ptolemaic references. Whether they were not in these works because they were
rare and the authors were unfamiliar with the coin, or because the authors didn't think they were
Egyptian is not possible to determine, but I it was probably a mix of both depending on the author. They weren't completely unpublished in 1995 though as there is an example published in Howgego's
work on
countermarks published in 1985, # 192, from the
ANS collection with a
countermark with the
head of
Athena.
Howgego, following
Newell, tentatively assigned the coin to
Commagene.
After
Weiser was published, Frank
Kovacs sold a specimen to John Bergman. When John died
CNG sold
his collection and this coin is in their sale 57, lot 604. The coin was cataloged as the second known specimen and it sold for $1350. This was the first modern, public
auction of an example of this coin, and is it normally happens, a high
price tends to bring more specimens out of the woodwork. Pretty soon, the 3rd know, 4th known, 5th known specimen appeared.
After the
CNG sale, which I cataloged if I recall correctly, I decided to see what I could discover about these coins. I wasn't convinced of the Nektanebo
attribution and to me the ram
side looked nearly identical to the rams on coins from
Syria. I do remember finding 2 or 3 other specimens in old catalogs, none of which were attributed to
Egypt. At this point I don't remember which catalogs they were in or what the catalogers gave as an
attribution. Sometime in the early 2000's I recall seeing a specimen in a small bag lot of bronzes, nearly all from Syrian or
Mesopotamia.
This was about where my article ended. I did do some stylistic comparisons with rams from
Syria and some comparative analysis of the Nektanebo gold staters, but I couldn't reproduce that now without a lot of
work.
The conclusion I reached was that the coins were clearly Syrian. I was quite pleased when I discovered that Kevin
Butcher came to the same conclusion. In 2004,
Butcher, in
his book
Coinage in Roman Syria, suggests a Northern Syrian
attribution (see pg. 405, #11). He illustrates a specimen from the BM which was acquired in 1947.
I used to write to dealers when they attributed and sold these coins as Nektanebo bronzes. Most just ignored me and most
still sell them as Nektanebo. At this point I've given up trying to convince anyone otherwise and collectors
still seem willing to pay
good money for them. I sort of thought the
Butcher reference would have ended the mis-attribution but evidently most people either aren't familiar with it or choose to ignore it. The Nektanebo
attribution is more exciting I guess, otherwise it's just a dull Syrian bronze worth about $25.
They aren't anywhere near as
rare as they used to be. I've seen at least 25-30 specimens. I
had one consigned to me when I was running VAuctions but I refused to run it as a Nektanebo so the consigner wanted it back. There are 5 on
VCoins right now.
Barry Murphy