Need Help Identifying This!

[pdale33]

 A buddy of mine reached out about this and I have been deep diving Byzantine and Late Roman coins, and I can find no example of one like this. Does anyone know anything about it?

[CPK]

Welcome to the Forum @pdale33!

Hmm...my gut reaction was maybe some type of Indian/eastern coinage, but is that a staurogram in the top picture? Perhaps somebody else will have a better idea.

[JeandAcre]

(Second edit, but it goes here:)  Yes, Welcome, @pdale33!  For an initial OP, you score Big!!!  This one is Big Fun.  Thank you.

I'm no less speculatively going in the same direction as @CPK, but even before noticing the staurogram (thanks, @CPK), I was seeing some pronounced late Roman influence on that side.  There are people in the Non-Western forum ( @Parthicus, just for one), who are absolute mavens in various South and Central Asian series, and have Lots to say, in particular, about various kinds and levels of cross-pollination with Hellenistic and Roman coins.  Along the lines of the Silk Road, there was a Lot of economic activity over that broad of a range.

I could recommend trawling the subforum for any thread that looks to be about something South Asian, or Central Asian that more or less directly impinges on the former.  Meanwhile, whatever it is, it's a Really Cool coin.  It would be a real joy to find out what it is, whether @CPK's and my guesses are ballpark or not. 

(Edit:) A very engaging irony, given that an element of late Roman influence is effectively unmistakable (especially to @CPK's point about the staurogram in the field), is that the relief is dramatically higher even than Roman issues from around the mid-4th century, when their level of relief was already recovering nicely from the flatness of ones from the later 'Barrack Emperors' into the Tetrarchy.  This, along with the motif on the other side --not that I have a clue what it is-- is seriously evoking Southern Asia, maybe even near-contemporaneous, say, c. 5th c. CE. 

All of this is irreducibly speculative, and correspondingly right-brain.  You could call it the 'Art Critic' school of attribution.  

(Third and, one can only hope, final edit:)  Another feature of the side with the staurogram, and the seated figure with the crowds to either side, suggesting a court or perhaps some sort of legislative assembly, is the lettering in the exergue, evoking mint signatures in late Roman coins going back to the early 4th c. CE. 

Edited November 16, 2023 by JeandAcre