Thanks for the follow-up information PtolemAE!
It is hard to not get tied to the idea of knowing "this ruler minted this coin" and accepting the idea that they may have been made over a period of time that is undefined or lasting though several reigns. I really enjoy Ptolemaic coinage but have been spoiled by roman imperial coins where you can narrow mint dates down to specific years, months or even days.
As the details of these issues are being reexamined, I was just hoping there may be a bit more known. I wasn't sure if some of the attributions I was seeing with more narrow attributions may be using newer thinking... but maybe they were just guesses for buyers that want that specific ruler information.
Thanks again!
Josh
It's a coinage that's interesting for many reasons but with few exceptions precise dating is at best iffy. There's lots of disagreement even between reference books and after much study my expectations of exactness are tempered by reality. A few can be narrowed down pretty well but most can't. Your coin at least has a symbol that gives us something to go on. Many of the later coin
types lack any
mintmarks or control
symbols at all. There are lots of ancient coinages that are similar in their
attribution to fairly wide ranges of dates - e.g. Athenian owls made over 50 year time spans in a single design, etc. That said, some day someone might find long lost records from a
Ptolemaic mint and of course collectors can focus on coins that name the ruler right on them, moreso the
Ptolemaic queens like Kleopatra
VII. A few actually have dates. It's just not that unusual for ancient
Greek coins to be a
bit vague on dating.
Roman coins are sometimes hard to date as well but more often have ruler
portrait and name associated with a relatively brief time period. But even those are sometimes
posthumous issues and only specialists know which are which.
Ptolemaic coinage, especially bronze coins, are more like U.S. cents - if those didn't have explicit dates on them we'd be hard pressed to know which president made which coin. And most folks don't associate a 1933
Lincoln cent as 'made by Franklin Roosevelt', anyway.
How we think about the 'date' and 'ruler' of
Ptolemaic bronze coins could say more about us than them
PtolemAE