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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;svessien, post: 8487656, member: 15481&quot;]Is it possible that this may be festival coins?</p><p><br /></p><p>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:</p><p><br /></p><p>[ATTACH=full]1502506[/ATTACH]</p><p><br /></p><p>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:</p><p><br /></p><p><a href="https://www.academia.edu/15313243/Panegyris_Coinages_AJN_20_2008_227_255" target="_blank" class="externalLink ProxyLink" data-proxy-href="https://www.academia.edu/15313243/Panegyris_Coinages_AJN_20_2008_227_255" rel="nofollow">https://www.academia.edu/15313243/Panegyris_Coinages_AJN_20_2008_227_255</a></p><p><br /></p><p>Excerpt: </p><p>«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.</p><p>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 </p><p>synedrion of cities honouring Athena Ilias. Prizes were sometimes fixed by them.</p><p><br /></p><p>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.»</p><p><br /></p><p>So what has this to do with your quesion about die engravers? Take a look:</p><p><br /></p><p>&nbsp;[ATTACH]1502507[/ATTACH] [ATTACH]1502508[/ATTACH] [ATTACH]1502509[/ATTACH] </p><p><br /></p><p>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. </p><p>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.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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