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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;GinoLR, post: 14303321, member: 128351&quot;]Wonderful coin <img src="styles/default/xenforo/clear.png" class="mceSmilieSprite mceSmilie101" alt=":woot:" unselectable="on" unselectable="on" />, and very reasonable price. I love it. Even if, as far as I am concerned, I only buy cage-free eggs.</p><p><br /></p><p>[ATTACH=full]1531495[/ATTACH] (Not my coin and not even my eggs of course)</p><p><br /></p><p>Now, <i>bona fide</i> Attic owl, or imitation?</p><p><br /></p><p>Some numismatists may think an owl is an imitation just because of the general style of the dies, or small details. Weight and chemical composition do not count, for imitations were often made of good Laurion silver with the right Attic weight (17.20 g in theory). Judging only from the style is, IMO, very subjective. The wet finger method (in French we say &quot;au pifomètre&quot; or &quot;à vue de nez&quot;, which means nose-o-meter, as if we just had to smell the thing to give an expert opinion).</p><p><br /></p><p>Theodor Buttrey distinguished 2 styles of Egyptian imitations, the M and B styles, but he had objective reasons for doing so. He noticed in a huge Egyptian hoard the predominance of owls showing design details such as the shape of the palmette on Athena&#039;s helmet, or the shape of her eye, and suggested that such coins, relatively common in Egyptian hoards but much less common in hoards found elsewhere, may have been minted in Egypt. This hypothesis was challenged by Christophe Flament because their metallic composition is the same as most other owls, but was confirmed by the discovery in an Egyptian collection of a cubic die showing all the characteristics of the Buttrey M style.</p><p><br /></p><p>For the rest, it is scientifically impossible to decide if an owl is an Athens minted one or a Levantine imitation, except of course if there is a clearly unathenian element in the type, such as a semitic letter, an extra symbol or some bizarre detail making no sense. Without such unquestionable details, is it possible to decide? Peter Van Alfen, when publishing a hoard, listed all <i>bona fide</i> Attic owls with a &quot;probably&quot; or a question mark.</p><p><br /></p><p>In the OP, why should the the poor caged owl be suspected to be an imitation? Because of the palmette? Yes, there is a leaf missing... Couldn&#039;t it just be a minor mistake of the celator, one guy among dozens hard working cutting dies in industrial quantities for the Athens mint? For me, unless this tetradrachm is from a Middle Eastern hoard containing other tets with die-links to this one, there is no undisputable reason not to attribute it to Athens.</p><p><br /></p><p>This drachm, for example, is a typical pi-style drachm. </p><p>[ATTACH=full]1531498[/ATTACH] </p><p>Good silver (I suppose so), Attic weight (4.23 g), auctioned in 2013 as &quot;Attica, Athens AR Drachm&quot;. There would be no reason to decide it is an imitation but it is. This coin is obverse and reverse die linked with dozens of other drachms found in a Gaza Strip hoard containing more than 850 drachms, all of them from only 5 different obverse dies, including&nbsp; this coin&#039;s. Some of these drachms were struck on Edomite dome-shaped coins used as flans. Dramatic evidence that these 850 drachms were minted not far from the hoard&#039;s location, in Raphia, Gaza or Edom.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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