Athenian Weight with Knucklebone & inscription - Stater

I agree - really interesting. My general understanding is that hacksilver is random weight. I got that mainly from Mark Blackburn, who looked at all the hacksilver from the Viking Torksey site and was adamant the pieces were just random weights. And I never saw that contradicted in big studies of the pre-coinage ANE stuff either.

However - Kletter published a lot of small Judean weights and his 3 gerah all lie between 1.6g and 2g. So it does look like this was probably (exceptionally) an attempt to chop exactly 2 gerah of silver.

So it really does come close to being a pre-coinage "coin"

Rob T

 

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