Show me your horses (biga, quadriga)

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I finally edited the background on my M. Scaurus denarius . It's not perfect (my editing skills stink), but I think it looks better than with the shadows of the coin edges on a piece of cream colored paper.

 

Here are a few of my horses.

 

Nice coins everyone! I only got a couple horses

 

Nice thread and welcome @I_v_a_n. it's difficult to find horses in your collection when you collect architecture, but I had a dig around and found these couple of cowboys called the dioscuri on a AR Quinarius, Rome around 211 BC, Sear 42, RSC-3, 2.3gm, toned.

 

I'm late to this horse party but here are a few equine quadrigas

First, my favorite:

SICILY, Syracuse. Agathokles tetradrachm

A (sea)horse quadriga:

PHOENICIA, Berytos. AE 19.5, Tyche/Poseidon in a hippocamp quadriga

Favorite Roman quadriga:

Elagabalus denarius; transporting the sacred stone of El-Gabal

The most quadrigas on one coin (four!):

Septimius Severus denarius; Circus Maximus

 

Philistis, wife of Hieron II
AR 5 litrae
Syracuse 270-230 BCE
4.46 gm, 18.1 mm
Obv: Diademed and veiled head, l., palm branch behind.
Rev: ΒΑΣΙΛΙΣΣΑΣ ΦΙΛΙΣΤΙΔΟΣ, Nike driving biga to left, E in l. field.
SNG ANS 893; SNG III (Lockett) 1017; Forrer 196

 

Oh, and how about a Fulvia?

 

Thanks to all for such an interesting show. Ancientnut - impressive level of collection!

 

Not quite ancient, but it is my oldest coin with a horse on it.

1547 Half Grozhen

 

I can see why that one is your favorite. Very beautiful. And very gut-wrenching story behing its acquisition.

 

A few horses I may not have shown before:

 

Here I want to note an OffTopic idea from the field of philosophy, but it is a remarkable observation. A culture that uses a script based on the alphabet has a lot more opportunities to express nuances and details of life, in contrast to the culture that uses a script based on the hieroglyphs. The reason is that a lot of shades of life creates the need for an infinite number of hieroglyphs, it is basically impossible for everyday life, so communication by hieroglyphs is like a discrete nature. It is very closely connected with the way of thinking of representatives of the respective cultures. The difference we can see even at coins.

 

Very much agreed. Over the years I have gotten in trouble mispronouncing Chinese pleasantries. Amazing how an inflection can COMPLETELY change a word's meaning... From "mother-in-law" to "pig" in just an infection... oops...

 

Hieroglyphs (Egyptian, anyway) are an alphabet. Some of the glyphs represent single consonants, some represent consonant clusters, and others represent syllables. But it's an alphabet just the same--the glyphs represent vocal sounds, not what is depicted in them. A quail chick, for example, doesn't mean "quail chick"; it is the letter W. An owl is the letter M. A foot is the letter B, and so on.

 

From wikipedia:

Jean-François Champollion (Champollion le jeune; 23 December 1790 – 4 March 1832) was a French scholar, philologist and orientalist, known primarily as the decipherer of the Egyptian hieroglyphs and a founding figure in the field of egyptology. A child prodigy in philology, he gave his first public paper on the decipherment of Demotic in 1806, and already as a young man held many posts of honor in scientific circles, and spoke Copticand Arabic fluently. During the early 19th-century French culture experienced a period of 'Egyptomania', brought on by Napoleon's discoveries in Egypt during his campaign there (1797–1801) which also brought to light the trilingual Rosetta Stone. Scholars debated the age of the Egyptian civilization and the function and nature of the hieroglyphic script, which language if any it recorded, and the degree to which the signs were phonetic(representing speech sounds) or ideographic (recording semantic concepts directly). Many thought that the script was only used for sacred and ritual functions, and that as such it was unlikely to be decipherable since it was tied to esoteric and philosophical ideas, and did not record historical information. The significance of Champollion's decipherment was that he showed these assumptions to be wrong, and made it possible to begin to retrieve the many kinds of information recorded by the ancient Egyptians.

In 1820 Champollion embarked in earnest on the project of decipherment of the hieroglyphic script, soon overshadowing the achievements of British polymath Thomas Young who had made the first advances in decipherment before 1819. In 1822 Champollion published his first breakthrough in the decipherment of the Rosetta hieroglyphs, showing that the Egyptian writing system was a combination of phonetic and ideographic signs – the first such script discovered. In 1824 he published a Précis in which he detailed the decipherment of the hieroglyphic script demonstrating the values of the phonetic and ideographic signs. In 1829 he traveled to Egypt where he was able to read many hieroglyphic texts that had never before been studied, and brought home a large body of new drawings of hieroglyphic inscriptions. Home again he was given a professorship in egyptology, but only lectured a few times before his health, ruined by the hardships of the Egyptian journey, forced him to give up teaching. He died in Paris in 1832, 41 years old. His grammar of Ancient Egyptian was published posthumously

 

Roman Collector, Orfew,
I do not have in mind a egyptians, but it looks like a normal way of evolution of hieroglyph writening system. It will go from the hiroglyph=word, after hieroglyph=syllable, after hiroglyph=one sound. This evolution will be accompanied by a simplification of characters. And at the end we'll have something like alphabet system on the surface, but deep inside we'll have very tenacious traditions and multilevel writening system. Because hieroglyphs originate from way of thinking and this mentality another with mentality, which has born something like alphabet system.
This observation is not mine. It made by a great philosopher of the 20th century Ivan Efremov, and he described this observation in his novel "The Hour of the Bull". But I agree with this observation.

 

As Roman collector explained, nowadays in Egypt hieroglyphs are used as a simple
alphabet , at leasts for tourists anyway
Here's an 18K cartouche with my name, which I bought as a souvenir.


and to stay on topic, I'll throw in a couple of horses:

When the mortal Castor died in a battle, his immortal brother Pollux asked his father Zeus to be reunited with Castor , Zeus agreed and put both as the Gemini constellation in space.