Featured Ancient Coins of Melita

I'm not familiar with videopad. With Videoleap, you can record directly into the video from your phone's microphone, so it might be worth exploring. I only used the free version messing around with my kids but I liked it very much. I've used iMovie before and it has many features that probably aren't replicated with Videoleap, but it certainly had enough for me and could produce a video like yours, I think. It is very user friendly.

 

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Great video, Tif. I enjoyed it.

 

OK TIF, but you gotta sing it next time. Great video! I do hope you post the transcript... it needs to be googleable.

The Egyptian iconography is certainly very intriguing. Apparently quite a few Egyptian artifacts have been found on Malta. Was there a resident Egyptian population? or were these just Egyptian traditions imported by the Phoenician/Punic traders and settlers? How syncretic were these elements? The Tanit symbol on your later coin is interesting in this regard.

I'm struck by the similarity of the veiled head and the famous Ptolemaic octodrachms from a similar time period. Coincidence? (Malta must have had important trade relations with Ptolemaic Egypt, no?)

 

Melita. The name originated from the Roman town of Melite, which was the ancient capital of Malta. Melite can be show as the symbolic depiction of Malta as a woman.
The name is from Greek, meaning "like honey".

 

Wow, Sev-- good eye and you're right! That's a rather striking resemblance. As for trade relations with Egypt, I haven't come across much evidence of that.

 

Your excellent video demonstrates that historians should ignore numismatic evidence only at their peril. I am convinced there is much to learn from these coins.

 

Fantastic presentation and some lovely coins! It's a shame that ancient coin collecting doesn't have a larger footprint on Youtube. Your video demonstrates that it can be successfully and entertainingly done.

 

Great video of a fascinating area of numismatics, very professionally presented looking forward to more if you have time. Congrats.

 

Yours is a beautiful voice @TIF and your words are clearly enunciated. Very informative and History Channel worthy and I mean that sincerely! If I were to attempt such a video with my scratchy back-alley thug voice—I'm afraid most of you would come away scratching your heads and asking "What did he say?"

 

@Nicholas Molinari, looking at the winged deity again I think I was misled by the odd Egyptian habit of mixing perspectives when drawing people (hips and legs side view, shoulders facing, head in profile). In this case I think the crown is facing yet the head is in profile -- and the crown is indeed the Atef crown.

The Atef crown is described as the the White Crown with an ostrich feather or other large feather on either side. In drawings this crown often seems to have the feathers front and back rather than on the sides. In sculptures the feathers are on the sides and a uraeus is at front.

A Hedjet (White Crown, symbolizing a pharaoh's domain over Upper Egypt):



2D representations of the Atef crown:

(images from wikipedia)

I think the perspective is simply messed up even though there is an ear notch which would mean the feathers are front and back. Look at this 3D representation:


image from http://apuntes.santanderlasalle.es/arte/egipto/escultura/osiris_gf.jpg

Looking at my coin's reverse again I see a roundish knob atop the hat, and the secondary line could be one of the side feathers. You can distinguish a uraeus too. I've painted the white crown white, a side feather blue, and the uraeus yellow:

 

I was able to copy-and-paste the autogenerated transcription that YouTube made for the video. (attached below)

There is evidence of Ptolemaic designs (and maybe even Egyptian celators co-habitating) in the area (in my example, Sicily) in the mid 3rd century BC.

 

Thanks! That's not a bad transcription!

I do have it written out because as you could probably tell, I read it for the recorded narration. After flailing about for a while I realized I had to first lock in the narration before I could assemble the video. I wrote it out like a screenplay, with "camera" directions in italics. That helped a bit

Here's the transcription with the "camera" parts removed. I may have changed a word here and there while reading it for the recording.

......... Ancient Coins of Melita .........​

If I say Malta, what’s the first thing that comes to mind?

Bogart? Fluffy lap dogs? The Malta Conference? The biblical apostle Paul?

Probably not ancient coins though, right?

Did you know that Malta produced its own coins during a very brief time in ancient history?

Around 218 BCE, shortly after the island became a Roman municipium, Malta, then known as Melita, produced pseudo-autonomous bronze coins.

Details are sketchy but find evidence suggests the period of locally produced coinage was brief, lasting less than 200 years. During this time, the scant legends on these coins went from Punic to Greek to Latin. After production ceased, no coins were struck on the island until the early modern era. Not counting variations and repeat issues, only eight different designs were struck in ancient Melita.

I was fortunate enough to acquire examples of two of the most unusual types, both of particular interest to me because of their iconography: Egyptian! Why do coins from a tiny island in the center of the Mediterranean sea depict deities of a civilization 1500 kilometers away? Phoenician traders were present on the island beginning around 900 BCE and they certainly had exposure to and assimilated some Egyptian gods. Carthaginians came in the sixth century and Romans in the third century BCE. Naturally these immigrants and settlers would have an influence on the design of local coinage but some of the iconography seems almost inexplicable.

The first of the iconographically Egyptian coins were struck around 175 BCE. The obverse depicts the veiled head of a female deity facing right, perhaps Tanit or Astarte. The reverse is an unmistakably Egyptian scene: Isis and her sister, Nephtys, flanking the mummy of their brother Osiris. Above are Punic letters which transliterate to aleph nun nun.

These three Egyptian gods each had many roles so many interpretations are possible but this particular scene is the mourning of Osiris by Isis and Nephtys. They are wailing and trying to restore to life their murdered and dismembered brother. Why, though-- why is this scene on a coin of Melita? Is it an appeal for regeneration and fertility of the land? Melita was not agriculturally rich so perhaps they were doing everything possible to please gods who influence the land? Or, does the mourning scene reflect the loss of a person of local importance? Perhaps there is another reason altogether, or many reasons. Unfortunately I don’t know the answer.

Of the nineteen of these coins I’ve seen in auction archives and private collections (twenty one including my two examples), none are going to win any beauty contests for condition. Nonetheless, I was thrilled to acquire them. With scarce or rare coins, you take what you can get. Of course, rarity isn’t everything. As the saying goes, in ancient coin collecting nothing is as common as a rare coin.

The second type with Egyptian-ish design was struck slightly later and may have involved two emissions, one around 160 and 125 BCE. The obverse shows the bust of Isis or Astarte facing left, with the symbol of Tanit before her on the earlier version and a wheat grain on the later version. The reverse depicts a winged male figure crouching left. The identity of this figure is debatable. Some authors call him Osiris; others note a similarity to the unnamed solar deity seen on classical era coins of Mallos. Maltese archaeologist and historian Tancred Gouder theorized the figure is of Ba’al Hammon, a principle Punic deity.


Information about these Melitan coins is somewhat scanty and this video does not do justice to the many questions raised, but perhaps after gathering, reading, and assimilating available books, papers, and articles I’ll try again. Don’t hold your breath though.

Thanks for watching!

That's only a page and a half of script yet the video runs more than 5 minutes. This is why I much prefer reading to watching TV or videos... reading is much quicker than listening to someone speak the same words!

 

I just happen to have a Triens from Roman Republican times; you don't see many of them, indeed!

 

Yup, exactly. I almost never watch the videos people post on Facebook.

 

Excellent video @TIF! (And obviously neat coins...)

 

Excellent video, and although I do not have any coins of Melita, I now have an Isis/Osiris coin on my wish list...thanks for sharing!

 

Good work. I tried a video a while back and remember how hard it was. Does anyone know a utility that you can use to convert your normal voice into James Earl Jones or the Whisperer? I have never seen or at least noticed any of the coins shown.

Now I have to try it again. The first step will be to find a subject.

 

Lovely video and lovely coins. One of the best things about Phoenician art to me is how they combined different styles from the areas in which they traded and sold goods. The charm of Phoenician art is the style they synthesized from cultures other than their own that is still somehow uniquely Punic. I especially like the stylized Tanit symbol and the portrait of Isis on the ex David Freedman collection coin. The reverse combines archaic Greek and Egyptian elements. I love it. Outstanding!!!

 

Thank you TIF for a fascinating video. The complexity of Malta's history never fails to amaze me.

 

Wow great video and fascinating coins!

It was worth waiting for.

I would love to see more just like it.

John