"Extremely Rare" Septimius Severus tetradrachm of Tyre: does anyone have Prieur?

Roman Phoenicia, Tyre. Trajan, AD 98-117. AR Tetradrachm (29x26mm, 14.57g, 7h). Tyre mint. Struck AD 98-100. Obv: AYTOKP KAIC NEP-TPAIANOC CЄB ΓЄPM; Laureate head of Trajan right; below an eagle standing right, club before, wheat stalk to left. Rev: ΔHMAPX-ЄΞ•YΠΛT•B; Laureate bust of Melkart-Herakles right, lion's skin tied at throat. Ref: Prieur 1478. Very Fine, nicely toned, slightly oblong flan.

 

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Following up on @pprp's and @dougsmit's comments, we know that that my just-purchased Septimius Severus tetradrachm from Tyre, categorized by Nomos as Prieur 1533, is an obverse die match to the only other known example of Prieur 1533 (the CNG specimen from the Prieur Collection). However, it is not a reverse die match to that example, because mine has dots within the reverse legend and CNG's clearly does not. Instead, I believe that my example is a reverse die match to CNG's Prieur 1534 (classified as a different type because the obverse depicts the Emperor laureate, draped, and cuirassed rather than solely laureate as in Prieur 1533). The reverse lettering and dots on my Prieur 1533, as well as the eagle, appear to me to be identical to the reverse of CNG's Prieur 1534. My example of Prieur 1533 is on the left, and CNG's Prieur 1534 specimen is on the right:



Therefore, I suppose that in theory my coin could be viewed as a hybrid between a Prieur 1533 obverse and a Prieur 1534 reverse. (The 12 other examples of Prieur 1534 on ACSearch all also appear to have dots in the reverse legend.) I hope that doesn't suggest that my coin is some sort of fourree or otherwise an ancient counterfeit! The weight of mine (13.83 g) is comparable to that of CNG's Prieur 1533 (13.96 g.) and Prieur 1534 (13.38 g.)

Also, I don't know how one could call mine a hybrid without more specimens of Prieur 1533 than the two that are presently known with the laureate head obverse, namely mine and the CNG specimen from the Prieur Collection. For all we know, the two types of obverse weren't really thought of as different types at the time they were minted, and it may not have been unusual to combine the reverse die of Prieur 1534 with both kinds of obverse.

 

Donna,

I agree with the rev. die link you show above between your coin and CNG's, and think that both of them are without doubt ancient and authentic.

"Mules" are type combinations which obviously don't belong together, for example an obv. of Septimius combined with a rev. legend of Caracalla. Your coin is simply a new die combination, since there is nothing to indicate that those two dies were not intended to be used together.

Prieur is a type catalogue, as stated in his subtitle, "A type corpus". In general he does not attempt to reproduce the punctuation of the obv. and rev. legends.

 

Thanks. That makes sense to me.

 

M&M FPL 250#95 if it could help

 

Many thanks. Do you know what year that catalog was published? I could be wrong, but if that's the specimen listed as Prieur 1733, then I don't think that's the same coin as the one sold by CNG in 1999 -- which supposedly came from the Prieur Collection -- or as mine. Which would mean that there are, in fact, three known examples, not the two I thought. Note that the reverse legend on this example appears to have more dots than the CNG specimen, but fewer than mine.

 

it is the dec 1964/jan 1965 list

 

Help me here with english term: it is mule or hybrid ?

 

I don't know a whole lot about these coins but I do have a Caracalla Tetradrachma from Tyre's neighboring city of Sidon. I believe these coins are considered to be scarce but I am not sure of that. The mint mark of Sidon is the "Cart of Astarte whatever that is. I think the obverse is double struck. Anyone who can tell me a bit more about this coin, please do so.

 

Looks to me that this coin is so Septimius that it has his DNA on it.

 

I think they're the same thing.

 

The two words basically mean the same thing, an incorrect coupling of types or dies.

However, as Roman Collector pointed out on CT a month or two ago, Besly and Bland, without citing any previous authority, proposed distinct meanings for the two terms in their Cunetio Treasure report, 1983, p. 24:

Hybrids: "the pairing of dies appropriate to different rulers".

Mules: "the pairing of dies belonging to different issues or phases" of the coinage of a single ruler.

A more important distinction, in my opinion, is whether the coin in question is the product of an official mint or is instead the work of an ancient counterfeiter. I therefore use the word "mule" to refer to an official coin with an incorrect type combination, whereas "hybrid" is my word for an incorrect coupling produced by a counterfeiter. I hesitate to say "hybrid" for an official coin, since the word seems to me tainted by its use in the earlier RIC volumes, where virtually every coin collected in the lists of "hybrids" is an ancient counterfeit rather than an official coin.

 

The same is true of Crawford; most of the Roman Republican "hybrids" he notes -- usually an obverse and reverse of a particular type with different control numbers -- are ancient counterfeits. See https://www.cointalk.com/threads/a-...an-denarius-could-it-possibly-be-real.364583/, where I quote Crawford's statement that "hybrids are often wrongly reported as being of pure silver, when they are in fact plated (for the only examples known to me of hybrids of pure silver see pp. 272 and 279 and no. 391; cf. also Table XVIII, 114)."