PHRYGIA : DOCIMIUM / EUMENEIA – same Hermes obverse: Itinerant mint – Die or traveling engraver ?

PHRYGIA DOCIMIUM / EUMENEIA – same Hermes obverse: Itinerant mint – Die or traveling engraver – Attempt to standardize mint?


Hi there !!

I hope your holydays went well, now it's time to get back to work.

I suggest you give me your opinion on two obverses that I find identical (Hermes and winged caduceus) with reverses that attribute them to different cities: DOCIMIUM and EUMENEIA, both Phrygian but separated by about 130 km.



Am I breaking down an open door? (As we say in France)

Have you ever seen this same obverse assigned to another (Phrygian) city?

Is there already a study on this?

Any comments or suggestions are welcome.

François

 

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Is it possible that this may be festival coins?

I was looking into 2nd-1st century BC tetradrachms from Troas, Abydos a couple of months ago. It struck me that I found surprisingly many die matches from a small number of known coins:



This, plus their substandard weight, led me to believe that these coins were made for special occasions, namely economic festivals, or market festivals. Read more about them here:

https://www.academia.edu/15313243/Panegyris_Coinages_AJN_20_2008_227_255

Excerpt:
«Recent research on fairs of the classical and Hellenistic periods has revealed the importance of festivals for the financial life of the city and the sanctuary. Alongside purely religious activities, there took place a number of fiscal and profit-yielding activities. Exceptional merchandise, such as slaves, animals, and luxury objects, were sold at civic and rural fairs. The pentekostê, the eponia, the tax on slaves, and the skênai tax were all paid by the participants to the organizing cities. These fiscal activities provided the organizers with a share of the fair-related profit.
In exceptional cases, ateleia was offered to the fairs by cities or kings and is also noted in inscriptions. Magistrates in charge of the fairs, i.e., the agoranomoi, whose duties were later assumed by the panegyriarchai, were appointed by the cities or religious associations, such as the
synedrion of cities honouring Athena Ilias. Prizes were sometimes fixed by them.

We can detect the purpose for which the rare festival coinages were issued: to provide a common currency and facilitate transactions at fairs attend-ed by buyers and sellers with different currencies, where moneychangers were needed. During the fairs in question, these festival coinages were the only legal currency (dokimon nomisma), and therefore all transactions had to use them. The participants were thus compelled by the organizers of the fairs, the agoranomoi, to use the city’s standards for all transactions, to exchange their currencies for the currency in the name and with the types of the relevant god, and probably to pay an agio for this procedure. At the end of the fairs, the currency in the name of the god had once more to be exchanged for the legal currency of the area.»

So what has this to do with your quesion about die engravers? Take a look:



Two of these coins are from Abydos, one from Lampsacus. Does it look like the same engraver? I think so. I imagine that coins for a citys economic festival may have been made at a mint of another city. This is just a theory. It may of course apply to coins that aren’t festival coins too, just like the Birmingham mint made coins for India and God knows how many other countries.
So perhaps it was the coins that travelled, not the engraver. I really don’t know..... But it’s a great observation you have made.

 

marvellous
good track to follow! by transposing it to the imperial era
I "digest" all this and I come back to you

François

 

I would say " similar " but not the same.

The position of the Caduceus being the most obvious.

I would agree that both dies were the work of one engraver.

 

It seems likely that one can transpose the tradition of festival coins to at least parts of the imperial era. Victor Clark mentions this on his web page, describing the billon coins of Trier:
http://www.constantinethegreatcoins.com/billon/
There are quite a few other references to ancient festival coins online. Considering the use of Hermes/Mercury on the obverse, contrary to the more traditional deities (or imperial busts) used by these two cities, one can imagine there was a specific occasion for this too.
Do you know if the two coins that you posted are quite rare? I was just browsing wildwinds, and didn’t find any of them. (Haven’t looked at RPC online yet).

 

That struck me too: Not exact die matches but very close. We may be fooled by the Eumenia sample being struck off center, though.

 

both don't seem to be rare:
- 13 examples listed in RPC IV.2, 2012 for Eumenea
- at least 6 copies found for Docimium (BNF: FRBNF41786221, SNGuk 0406_4966 and 0406_4967, + Leu, Naumann, Pecumen sales)

+ mine ;-)

i agree with you about the probability of " festive" representation of hermes + caduceus (kerykeion) on obverses

 

Even on the Eumenea's mint , the RPC IV 2012 shows several positions of the caduceus in relation to the face of hermes

https://rpc.ashmus.ox.ac.uk/coins/4/2012

the engraving has certainly had to be renewed over the years