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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;John Anthony, post: 1874622, member: 42773&quot;]I have a handful of new early Nabataeans arriving over the course of the month, so I&#039;ll dedicate this thread to them and eventually finish it off with a team picture.</p><p><br /></p><p>The first installment is a proto-Nabataean overstrike variety that I&#039;ve been hunting for some time. This coin comes in at 22mm, 6.7g, and that&#039; s significant because the vast majority of these overstrikes are smaller, at around 18mm, 3g. I&#039;ve only come across one other coin of this larger size for sale, and now I&#039;m glad I didn&#039;t buy it, as this piece presents far more dramatic features.</p><p><br /></p><p>As I mentioned in another thread, I prefer to collect overstruck coins that exhibit details of both the host coin&#039;s design and the new design. This example is a perfectly glorious mess. A 45-degree counter-clockwise rotation of the obverse gives us a clear picture of Zeus&#039; face peering out of Athena&#039;s neck, and the reverse shows copious detail from the overstruck eagle, not to mention that his head is peering over the top of the edge of the overstruck devices.</p><p><br /></p><p><a href="http://postimage.org/" target="_blank" class="externalLink ProxyLink" data-proxy-href="http://postimage.org/" rel="nofollow"><img src="http://s23.postimg.org/ppf3kw9or/proto5.jpg" class="bbCodeImage wysiwygImage" alt="" unselectable="on" /></a></p><p><br /></p><p>This coin demonstrates that it was overstruck with the smaller dies intended for 18mm coins. The other coins of this larger size - that I&#039;ve seen - exhibit the same characteristic. We know the older Ptolemaic bronzes were denominated by size, so we are left with the question: did these larger Nabataean coins circulate at a higher value than the smaller? It&#039;s a question that may never be answered.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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