I was trying to find out a little
bit more about the mysterious
inscription on this Poseidonia
stater.
I found a couple of references, but they all either reference or boil down to the note in
HN Italy 1114: "... usually read as
seilu ... but M. Guarducci reads
megul ...".
'
Seilu' supposedly refers to the Silaros river, while '
Megyl' would be the name (Megyllos) of a magistrate or oikist of Poseidonia.
M. Guarducci wrote about this in
his article "Alcune monete di Posidonia e la fondazione dell'
antica città " in "Gli archeologi italiani in onore di A. Maiuri" (1965). Unfortunately I haven't been able to get hold of the text so far.
This is what I'm reading (there's a clearer example of the coin on
https://www.sixbid-coin-archive.com/#/en/search?text=seilu):
- 1. San vs Mu: All specimens I've seen seem to have a raised leg, pointing towards mu. However it could be a sloppily written san.
- 2. Epsilon
- 3. Iota vs Gamma: To read it as iota this inscription needs to be written in a different alphabet as iota is invariantly crooked in 'Posei' (
). On the other hand, this would simply be gamma in the expected local Achaian alphabet (cf. Jeffery 'Local scripts of archaic Greece') - 4. Lambda vs Upsilon: To get lambda, this letter needs to be mirrored compared to the first, while it would be upsilon in the typical stemless form without mirroring.
- 5. Upsilon vs Lambda: This is not very clear on my coin, but one leg is usually shorter (see Sixbid examples). This seems difficult to explain in case of upsilon, but again, it matches nicely with the local form of lambda
So I'm a little
bit confused why anyone would argue for the 'Seilu' interpretation given the various difficulties associated with it (
alphabet change, letter mirroring, raised legs in first and last letters) when 'Megyl' is the straightforward reading in the expected
alphabet of the Achaian colonies in
Italy.
Is it known where the 'Seilu' reading originates from (and why it's seemingly
still the usual interpretation in recent descriptions)?
