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Style to mint identification anyone?


AETHER

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I took a shot at a Alexander III drachm from ebay because I found it interesting and won. I found the test cuts and portrait style interesting in particular. 

The coin is proving to be hard to identify however, to me it looks like the monograms and mintmarks are all but erased from reverse wear. 

I can only make out Zeus's legs, which I'm certain are uncrossed, but that's about it.

Anyone familiar with this particular style and the mint it may most likely resemble ? 

I recall seeing other coins with the same lion headdress curl in the far back of the head. The last layer curls opposite to the second layer.. but I cannot find similar ones at this time.

Any ideas appreciated, thanks.

Screenshot_20240110-2353202.png.a22f2e884084c144dbde045aaaef4703.png

Screenshot_20240110-2353322.png.fef5ccf55d707194f0683546ff786c99.png

 

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I had a look through all the Alexander and Philip III drachm types dated up until 310 BC with uncrossed legs in PELLA and I didn't find a match. The obverse style has me a bit stumped, it looks familiar yet I didn't find a close match from another type. The reverse does seem to show Zeus with uncrossed legs and note how they are relatively parallel and stiff, as is the rest of his posture. This makes it easy to rule out a lot of the lifetime/early posthumous drachms from Asia Minor, which tend to depict Zeus with a wide spread-leg posture or with one leg angled behind the other slightly forming a lambda shape. The styles do change from type to type at times though so don't write off those mints wholesale. One issue with just looking by type in PELLA is that a single type can have quite different styles or even depict Zeus with both crossed and uncrossed legs so undoubtedly I missed some examples because the picture PELLA chose to represent the type didn't look close to yours.

 

edit: just realised I left the image attached below, was meant to remove it. The reason I attached it was just to illustrate the stiff posture of Zeus on your coin as compared to similar postures on other coins, the one below is a tetradrachm from Babylon but a similar posture can be found on quite a few "Eastern" mints, particularly those around the Levant.

image.png

Edited by Kaleun96
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