The Last Nabataean Bronzes.

This lovely little tidbit arrived yesterday. My own image...

 

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Your image looks much nicer than the dealer image you posted earlier! Beautiful coin John.

 

Thank you. I like taking pics in sunlight and we're having a sunny day - cold, but sunny. I've tried all sorts of expensive lighting arrangements, but nothing makes my coins smile like God's big light bulb in the sky.

 

atta-boy, JA => that baby "pops" now that you've taken a JA-photo!! (cool coin)

 

So do you have a set up in a sunny location in your home? I'm very interested in your method.

 

No, he does it outside. Kind of a pain when it's below zero with three feet of snow.

 

Hah - my highly professional method. I have a small copy stand and a Nikon Coolpix. Set up a card table in the back yard around 11 AM on a sunny day, take a manual white balance check, set to macro and snap away. Occasionally I use small LED spot lights to augment. I edit in the solid black background in Photoshop and tweak the brightness and contrast, but typically that's all - no color curve or saturation editing required if you've set your white balance properly.

 

I use the same thing. Funny eh?

 

Hey friends, I have all of these coins in hand now, and I've created a composite of my Rabbel II type set.

Coin 3 has not been posted before - I acquired it because it represents a different engraving style in the Rabbel/Gamilat types. (The coin Zumbly posted is in the same style.) Meshorer calls this style crude, and it's certainly more simplistic than the engraving on Coin 2, but personally I wouldn't go so far as to call it crude - it's merely different in my eyes, stylized more so than realistic.

I wish I could say this was a complete type set of the bronzes of Rabbel II, but Schmitt-Korte reports one known specimen of a type that has only the king's bust on the obverse, and his name inscribed within a wreath on the reverse, harkening back to an older type minted during the reign of Aretas IV.

I'm currently working on an overview of these coins that will include a reading key that incorporates askea's correction. I'll post it over at FORVM when it's finished and create a link here, for anyone that wants a more comprehensive analysis.

1. Rabbel/Shuqailat
2. Rabbel/Gamilat (Style 1)
3. Rabbel/Gamilat (Style 2)
4. Rabbel/Hagru

 

Neat composite. Nice to be able to see the different styles side by side.
For half a moment I was wondering who this Meshorer was and why he was dissing our coins.

 

Ya'akov Meshorer was a brilliant numismatist who published an extensive analysis of Nabataean coins in 1975. It was his doctoral dissertation. I'm not sure that he meant the word "crude" in a disparaging way, because his writing is quite objective in terms of descriptions. But the word does carry negative connotations, and I prefer to say that the portraits on Coin 3 are stylized line drawings. To my eyes, they have as much aesthetic appeal as the engraving on Coin 2, but in a different way.

 

I'm onboard with what you said. It's just harsh to compare two Nabataeans and call one of them "crude".

 

Precisely. Excluding the early silver, all Nabataeans are crude by Graeco-Roman standards. Sometimes, however, the engravings are quite beautiful, and you just wish they had put a little more effort into the actual minting - the flan preparation and striking, etc.

If you took any of the dies that made the coins above and used them on larger, well-trimmed, rounded flans, you'd have coins that would easily stand up to the best LRB's, for instance.

 

Here's a link to my post at FORVM with complete details. See the second post on this page...

https://www.forumancientcoins.com/board/index.php?topic=91378.50

 

Thanks John , fantastic job