Just before
Christmas a regular contributor and advertiser on
wildwinds sent me a photo of a
Lysimachos tetradrachm (
type:
Athena seated on the
reverse) with a request for
identification. I knew that there are several different
monograms and
symbols on these so I thought I'd made a quick xls list, like my popular
RIC lists, of such tetradrachms.
So I first turned to
Thompson's
work, then the
Meydancikkale hoard, the
Mektepini hoard,
Marinescu's
work, then thought I'd better check Müller,
SNG France,
SNG Cop,
SNG Black Sea,
SNG Black Sea Stancomb, then I remembered the Babylon, Commerce Demetrius and Gordion
hoards - oops, I nearly forgot
Bellinger,
Mionnet, Cousinéry in
Paris.
And - in the words of the song in Jeff Wayne's "War of the Worlds" - and
still they come: Yet more variations of
mintmarks,
symbols, their positions (even without distinguishing between outer left and inner left, apart from using a comma) and combinations, in the
Black Sea Hoard, the Ordu hoard, the
Armenak hoard, the Corpus Nummorum website, Meadow's Tenedos article, the
Mesopotamia hoard, the Tell Halaf hoard, the Kirikhan hoard,
Sardis XI Excavations, the Achaeus hoard and various works by Imhoof......
I am currently checking the "unpublished" and "vars" on
Coin Archives Pro, then there is
Callatay's
Guerres to check through and then
Arslan &
Ulrike Peter's "
Thrakien und
Moesien" plus a couple of other entries in my indexed "Books Contents" xls list..
And the result
so far after nearly 4 weeks, working on the list every day ?
1,167 variations and 552 different monograms, all illustrated on a page of the xls...
So much for my initial idea of there being only "several different
monograms and
symbols"
