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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;John Anthony, post: 1781578, member: 42773&quot;]<font face="Times New Roman">OK Class, here’s everything you never wanted to know about this coin, and why it’s special to me. This is probably going to be one of those entries that the forum software makes me cut in two, because you can’t put more than 10,000 characters in a post. Pfft. I can’t even say hello without a few hundred characters,</font></p><p>&nbsp;</p><p><font face="Times New Roman">Anyway, back in the good old days of the 1st-century BC, Alexander Jannaeus, the king of the Judaeans, decided his backyard was a getting a little too small, and the only solution was to take over the world. The good folk of Damascus didn’t particularly care for this plan, but they had a bit of a problem: their Seleucid boss-man, Antiochus VII had just departed for the big bacchanal in the sky. Now Antiochus may not have been the nicest guy in the world, but he had been a very good general, spending most of his time traipsing around the Near East kicking everyone’s butt. Damascus had been safe from the Judaeans as long as Antiochus was around, but now they needed a new guy to take over.</font></p><p>&nbsp;</p><p><font face="Times New Roman">After carefully examining a number of resumes, they asked Aretas III, the king of the Nabataeans to step in. They figured he’d do a good job because, after all, how would you feel if ten thousand furious Arabs came charging at you on camels, brandishing scimitars? It turns out that they made the right choice. Aretas III rounded up all his minions, marched into Judaea, and unloaded a serious can of whup-ass on Jannaeus. Alex finally had enough and said, “Whoa, dude, relax! I was kidding! I’ll just go back home and play with my harem”. And thus began the reign of Aretas III over Damascus in 84 BC.</font></p><p>&nbsp;</p><p><b><font face="Times New Roman">Have a seat, Tyche…</font></b></p><p>&nbsp;</p><p><font face="Times New Roman">Now as far as divine entities go, Tyche had done a pretty good job of protecting Damascus, but evidently an earlier Seleucid king, Demetrius III, had decided that she needed a break. On at least one type of his coins, he had her take a seat. She was a goddess after all, and she could probably fulfill her duties just as well sitting down as standing up. So we were now presented with the Tyche of Damascus found on my coin: turreted, seated left on rock, right hand extended, holding cornucopiae, river god swimming underneath. Actually, a similar version of Tyche had appeared earlier on the coins of Antioch, but Demetrius wasn’t renowned for original thought.</font></p><p>&nbsp;</p><p><font face="Times New Roman">This version of Tyche was so popular, that she was taken up by the Armenians that ruled Damascus after Aretas III, for instance, Tigranes I. (Keep this coin in your back pocket – it takes a starring role later on.)…</font></p><p>&nbsp;</p><p><font face="Times New Roman"><a href="http://postimage.org/" target="_blank" class="externalLink ProxyLink" data-proxy-href="http://postimage.org/" rel="nofollow"><img src="http://s13.postimg.org/tuvc7nqbb/tigranes.jpg" class="bbCodeImage wysiwygImage" alt="" unselectable="on" /></a></font></p><p>&nbsp;</p><p><font face="Times New Roman">And she continued on the Damascus coins well into Roman provincial times. Augustus…</font></p><p>&nbsp;</p><p><font face="Times New Roman"><a href="http://postimage.org/" target="_blank" class="externalLink ProxyLink" data-proxy-href="http://postimage.org/" rel="nofollow"><img src="http://s2.postimg.org/lzj88hcih/damascusaug.jpg" class="bbCodeImage wysiwygImage" alt="" unselectable="on" /></a></font></p><p>&nbsp;</p><p><b><font face="Times New Roman">Numismatic Sleuthing…</font></b></p><p>&nbsp;</p><p><font face="Times New Roman">So we know exactly when the Nabataean coin would have been issued: the first year of Aretas III’s reign in Damascus, 84 BC. Figuring out when the run ended is also possible, but we need to go about it like Shelock Holmes.</font></p><p>&nbsp;</p><p><font face="Times New Roman">We know that at some point, the Armenian king Tigranes took over after Aretas III – nobody’s quite sure what happened there, but it’s possible that Aretas just decided to pack his bags and move to Petra. After all, Petra was starting to turn into the Nabataean version of the Taj Mahal, and any respectable king is going to need his Park Avenue address.</font></p><p>&nbsp;</p><p><font face="Times New Roman">Fortunately for us coin sleuths, some of Tigranes’s coins, like the one pictured above, exhibit the Tyche of Damascus, telling us exactly where they were minted. If we could discover when these Armenian coins began their run, we could put an end date to the Nabataean issues as well. Unfortunately, Tigranes did not date his bronze coins, but happily he did produce silver coins at Damascus with dates. The earliest one known is dated to 242 of the Seleucid era, corresponding to 71 BC.</font></p><p>&nbsp;</p><p><font face="Times New Roman">So it’s clear that these issues of Aretas III would not have been minted after that year. It’s possible that they were discontinued earlier – an earlier Damascus silver of Tigranes could be discovered, but the information we have now sets the run of the Nabataean piece between 84 BC and 71 BC.</font></p><p>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p><p>Heh...made it under the wire.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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