Ryan (and all other interested):
A strong candidate among the earliest winged figures on coins is the one in the new Gemini III. Now I have to find it again, but for the time being it's top right in the group on the table of contents page.
Yes, in lovely
electrum it is p. 40, no. 172. Those sphinxes and sirens with a tendril coming out of the top of the
head are Early Archaic, and, considering the way it's put together, I'd be surprised if this one were after c. 600 BCE.
The blurb about literary sirens, loc. cit., is entirely irrelevant. At this date it's better characterized as a Greek version of an
Egyptian soul-bird--but as we know from those Cyzicene winged
boar protomai they were having a lovely time combining all sorts of bodies and heads. Think, if your grandfather
had a Late Geometric
krater on
his grave, how exciting it was the first time you saw something like those prototypes of chimaeras at Carchemish and Zincirli. BTW, long before coinage, Mycenaean artists
had had a fling with east-Mediterranean trade art. That tendril coming from the
head seems to have been from Levantine sources, which is not to say anything about the
mint of the
electrum hekte. The motif traveled as fast as a ship could sail, and occurs simultaneously all over the Aegean and most of the peninsula.
Pat L.
Here, Late Protocorinthian (and the dating of c. 635 should be insisted on) Chigi Olpe, now in the
Villa Giulia in
Rome, is the double-bodied
sphinx (speaking of playing with combinations), showing just the most famous example of the tendrils 'growing' from the head--however the
Greeks understood them. This is from the original publication, by lithography, in
Antike Denkmäler. The
Villa Giulia forbade photography; after all, it's only been published for a century and a quarter...
Below, in grayscale, and dated c. 650 (and maybe half a generation earlier than the Chigi Olpe) is a
sphinx or siren (you can't tell) from
Aegina, but it is Middle to Late Protocorinthian
work.
These are just ones already on my computers.