Hello All, Received two new obols, difficult to make decent pictures. One is Phoenician with an Owl, from Tyre. and the other is from Mazaios satrap, with a lion and Baal on a throne. Please post you Obols !!
Sorry I have no scale indeed quite rare, but for sure 100% authentic..I'll try to make better pictures later, I am just back from work...they are really nice, normally I would not say that...the Phoenician with the Ankh symbol on the side with the owl is top. one is this one.
Weighing 0.76 g., this silver coin is thought to have been struck in Sidon- Phoenicia during the Phoenician revolt against Persian king Artaxerxes circa 350 B.C. Some theory believes it's typically Phoenician. Others assume it's rather Persian. It's a controversy. The obverse shows a possible Phoenician king holding a knife with his right hand, and a lion(possibly representing the Persian occupant) with his left. The shape of the letter O is between, which is likely to be the Phoenician Semitic letter "Ayn ". Reverse shows a war galley.
Very nice and apparently very scarce issues... I only have one hemiobol---all the rest are Drachms or Tets.
I love the little silver but why stop with the huge obols? Many of the small coins get called by Athenian names like obol when they really were small fractions in other systems. In some cases we know the name and in some we don't. The coin below might be called a 1/8 obol at .1g but I really doubt the people of Phocaea called it that. It is from one of my pages on 'Tiny Treasures'. http://www.forumancientcoins.com/dougsmith/tiny.html http://www.forumancientcoins.com/dougsmith/microdigital.html High on my want list is a 1/8th obol of Athens. I have never seen one I believe is from there but occasionally we see copies from the East in small size. My favorite full obol is this one from the early period at Athens when the owl was shown with three separate tail feathers rather than one unified prong. I need a better photo (challenge coming). I call the two below (each 0.7g) 1/16 shekels. They are from the region that produced your coins. Sidon - note the different Phoenician letters between king and lion Biblos I admit getting a kick out of going to a show and asking to see fractional silver. Most dealers get out drachms. They will have plenty of tetradrachms but few really tiny coins.
Hello Doug, wonderful, I got many small one's make pictures later..I saw one small Athena fraction coin from the East, was thinking and than sold...too late, see a picture of my mobile, this gives a better impression.
I was promised to receive a few Phoenician "obols" next April. I wish I could solve the puzzle of the Phoenician letter between the king and the lion.
I reshot this one with a better view of the tail feathers but it has other problems so it is not over yet.
I also only have one hemiobol, but to the few people who've seen my collection, it attracts the most attention despite being so small, or maybe because it is so small. I need to take new pictures...as the side with the boar and tummy fish are out of focus.
Ionia, Miletos, Late 6th- early 4th century BC. 1/12th Stater (1.2 gm, 10.5mm). Obv.: Forepart of lion left with head reverted right. Rev.: Starlike floral design in square incuse. SNG Helsinki II 285. so i guess this is a 1/12 stater, is that a diobol? i really can't keep all this stuff straight.
There are two ways to get sharpness when you get very close. Stopping down the lens works but there is a problem called diffraction that reduces overall sharpness when too small an aperture is used. The other is called focus stacking. You take several images (for coins I use four but I have done other subjects with as many as a dozen) with each focused on a different distance from the camera. You must focus manually to do this. The software combines the images using the most detailed part from each parent image producing something sharper than is possible with any one image. This allows shooting tilted coins, high relief coins and very small coins when there is not much depth of field available normally. Most microscope photos you see are focus stacked. Coins are among the easier things you can do with the software. I use a simple freeware program available online called CombineZ. It is way more sophisticated than I need for my purposes. Of course it has more uses in nature than with coins but at FREE, CombineZ is a real bargain. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CombineZ
To get deeper depth of field with focus stacking and to make sure entire depth was in focus, one would need to take a lot of photos, and this compounds with the issue that DoF becomes even shallower at higher magnification / shorter object distances... The easiest solution is always a bigger CMOS. Bigger the frame size, bigger DoF with the same magnification. Fullframe better than APS-C. Medium format better than FF, so on and so forth. Coins are flat so DoF isn't the biggest worry here I think, unless one was to take flan photos and wanted the entire piece to be within focus... Diffraction does not kick in til you had stepped down to F14 or w/e. The amount of light had to be very little. This is, however, more of an issue with newer CMOS, higher resolution (30MP FF sensors like 5DIII). You can probably notice diffraction around F9 on those? Pro macro shooters reverse mount a lens on a bellow to get both magnification and DoF. Here's an example of a LOT of DoF (spider is longer than it's wide) and the 2nd photo is his rig.
chrsmat => I have my example listed as an Obol Ionia, Miletos Silver Obol "Roaring Lion & Star Ornament" 325-475 BC. Diameter: 9.5mm Weight: 1.10 grams Obverse: Forepart of roaring lion left. Reverse: Star ornament within incuse square. SNG Kayman: 476-487, Klein 424-425. Yah, I always get a bit rattled when I try to use the Attic-standards ... => 1.10 grams would probably place it as a trihemiobol, but I usually see this example listed as an obol (see link, below) https://cngcoins.com/Search.aspx?IS_ADVANCED=1&ITEM_IS_SOLD=1&ITEM_INVENTORY_NUMBER=&CONTAINER_NAME=&ITEM_LOT_NUMBER=&ITEM_DESC=Ionia, Miletos Silver Obol lion star&SEARCH_IN_CONTAINER_TYPE_ID_1=1&SEARCH_IN_CONTAINER_TYPE_ID_3=1&SEARCH_IN_CONTAINER_TYPE_ID_2=1&VIEW_TYPE=0 Ummmm, or I guess it could be listed as 15 onkia, eh?
Fantastic coins! Thanks for sharing. I hope to get the roaring lion obol at some point this year. Erin
I remembered I have a tiny coin weighing exactly one gram, 1.00 g. So I thought it might be some kind of an obol. I don't know and even can't recognize anything in that bronze coin below.
