Hi everyone! I recently watched a neat documentary on Atlantis - and learned about a civilization that lived on at least Crete and Santorini. The documentary is cool and goes into some of the really neat architectural aspects of that culture (the ruins are still being excavated it looks like). Unfortunately it was mainly wiped out due to a mega eruption of the volcano that Santorini surrounds. The eruption caused a series of several massive tsunamis to hit Crete - including Knossos. Here's a link to the documentary for anyone interested: Atlantis or not, that culture was quite advanced architecturally. Anyway, i started doing some googling to see if i could find any coins from that culture. I didn't find anything yet, however because i was including Atlantis in my search terms i encountered some other articles/forum posts speculating about Atlantis - one of which thought maybe Atlantis was the Americas. That idea hasn't been legitimized (the culture from the History documentary seems way more likely to me), BUT it did lead me to some speculation about a Carthaginian coin having a world map on it! Here's a brief summary of what he claims to have found - it includes a link to his university page, but this page showed a color image with a better depiction of what he was looking at: https://phoenicia.org/america.html The image of the coin is copyrighted and i don't have one in my collection, but it's a gold tanit from Carthage and the side with the horse has some markings which is what he interprets as a world map. I thought that was interesting and it's something i want to read more about, but ultimately this led me to wonder what different ancient coins have maps on them? I have one in my collection: https://www.ngccoin.com/certlookup/5769494-016/NGCAncients/ Sorry for the bad photo quality - it's an AE13 with a dark patina and it's slabbed, so it's really hard for me to photograph using my phone (i don't have a coin photo setup pulled together yet), and unfortunately the NGC linked photos don't seem all that much better. It's from the Achaemenid empire, possibly minted in Ionia. AE13 I don't have the weight since it's not listed on the slab and for now i'm not removing it from the slab. When i bought the coin it was listed as the map being of Ephesos. Show me your neat map coins please peeps! Also curious as to peoples' thoughts on the possible map on the Carthaginian coin - is it a map? do you think it depicts the Americas?
kool coin...and thanks for the link of the 'documentary'..someone here has a coin featuring the labyrinth...
I also have one of the Achaemenid coins featuring the putative map of Ephesus on reverse: As for the Carthaginian coin linked: I think this is just pareidolia (the tendency to see patterns where there isn't one). Other than one part of the squiggle that looks vaguely like Iberia, that is just not a decent map of the world as the Carthaginians knew it, and absent any more convincing evidence, I still do not think there was any Old World contact with the New World prior to the Viking settlement in Newfoundland. (Except possibly some contact between Polynesia and South America, I haven't researched that enough to feel confident yet and I think that more evidence is being found there.)
@Theodosius i found this article: https://www.coinworld.com/news/precious-metals/mapping-a-new-collection-maps-on-coins.html that talks about these ones with the map of Ephesos on them (like mine and the one @Parthicus posted). These are from apparently as early as 4th century BC and mine is labelled as being minted between 350-333 BC. I was a little disappointed though that the article didn't feature more. If you know of even any medieval ones that would be neat to see!
It seems @finny that your coin may be the oldest. That is pretty amazing. There are Roman coins with pictures of harbours that are not exactly maps. I can't think of another ancient coin depicting a map. John
Interesting topic idea. I am not aware of any maps per se on ancient coins. As Theodosius says maybe a harbor scene such as coins depicting Ostia or the harbor at Alexandria come closest.
Fascinating - I had assumed that the punches used on Achaemenid coins were just like rough hammers, not that they had any meaning! Re: the Carthaginian coin, I believe that the landmass to the west of Spain is more likely to be the Canary Islands, which are known to have been visited by Juba II but possibly discovered much earlier. The other ancient map coin is from post-Maurya India, and features a depiction of a river running down from three mountains https://www.acsearch.info/search.html?id=5960871 (Before anyone goes out and buys one, beware, as there are a lot of very well-made fakes, which thankfully all have the same flan shape: https://www.acsearch.info/search.html?id=6281083 ) I believe that one of my rough Indian coins has the same or similar motif
My very worn version of the above: https://www.cointalk.com/threads/worn-but-historical.347130/page-2#post-3723688 - Broucheion
I sure can't think of one.... One possibility, later on, might be earlier modern jetons, c. 16th-17th centuries. But even there, most of what you get are quasi-aerial views of cities (or battles), like you mention in the case of Romans.
