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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;Parthicus, post: 2841162, member: 81887&quot;]Taking a break from showcasing my Frank Robinson wins, here&#039;s a recent win from one of John Anthony&#039;s CoinTalk auctions:</p><p>[ATTACH=full]672166[/ATTACH] </p><p>Roman Empire, Mesopotamia, Edessa.&nbsp; AE18 (18mm, 3.4g).&nbsp; Elagabalus (218-222 AD).&nbsp; Obverse: Laureate bust of Elagabalus left, [AYTO KAIC] MAP AYR ANT around.&nbsp; Reverse: Turreted, veiled, and draped bust of Tyche left, [KOLW] MAR EDECCA around.&nbsp; Cf. BMC 72, SNG Copenhagen 213.</p><p><br /></p><p>This coin was issued under Elagabalus (218-222 AD), and his story is certainly lurid enough to hold any collector&#039;s attention.&nbsp; However, what interested me in this coin was the place it was minted: the once-important, now almost forgotten city of Edessa in northern Mesopotamia.&nbsp; Edessa is recorded in inscriptions as early as the 7th century BC.&nbsp; From about 142 BC to about 242 AD it was the capitol of a small kingdom known as Osrhoene (also spelled Osroene, or sometimes called the Kingdom of Edessa).&nbsp; Osrhoene&#039;s location made it an important buffer between the Roman and Parthian/Sasanian zones; Osrhoene generally sided with Rome as a client state, often putting the Roman emperor on the coinage, sometimes alongside the Edessan king.&nbsp; After 242 AD, it was absorbed as a Roman province.&nbsp; </p><p><br /></p><p>Several important events occurred here.&nbsp; When Trajan&#039;s appointed puppet king of Parthia, Parthamaspates, was chased off his throne in 116 AD and forced to flee for his life, he was given the co-kingship of Osrhoene as a sort of consolation prize.&nbsp; The emperor Caracalla was assassinated on the road between Edessa and Carrhae in 217 AD, as he stepped off the side of the road to urinate.&nbsp; (Lesson: Try to hold it in on long road trips.)&nbsp; At the Battle of Edessa in 260 AD, the Sasanian king Shahpur I captured the Roman emperor Valerian alive, an unprecedented humiliation for Rome.&nbsp; (While Shahpur probably did use Valerian as a human footstool, the story that he later had the dead Valerian&#039;s skin tanned and stuffed with straw like a human scarecrow is almost certainly a lie meant to discredit the Sasanians.&nbsp; Shahpur was an observant Zoroastrian and eager to ingratiate himself with the increasingly powerful Zoroastrian priesthood, and desecrating a human corpse in that fashion would have lost him key religious support.)&nbsp; Edessa was also an important site of early Christianity; the Edessan kings (most of whom seem to have been named Abgar) had converted to Christianity by 190 AD, and Edessa sent the earliest Christian missionaries into Sasanian territory.</p><p><br /></p><p>This is a pleasant little coin, with nice tan desert patina (that hopefully is real and not the addition of a certain dealer whose handiwork has been discussed here before).&nbsp; I won it in John Anthony&#039;s auction as the only bidder for $35, but a couple of subsequent nice Mesopotamian provincials went much higher.&nbsp; Show off your Mesopotamian coins, or Elagabalus, or Shahpur I, or...[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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