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Message:: [QUOTE="EWC3, post: 3557562, member: 93416"]Wow - thanks for posting this - never took note of them before! Have you got an explanation of why its made into a "15 shekel" coin? As far as I can tell, the Phoenicians used a metrology that emerged around Syria well before 2,000 BC. It was a mina of c. 470g, split into 50 shekels (qedets) of 9.4g. That mina began to dominate Egyptian weight standards after 2000 BC – often as a deben of 10 qedets thus c. 94g. That decimal system started to break down in the Hellenistic period, into a kind of binary pounds and ounces system. So still a c. 470g but yielding an ounce of c. 29g, from which today we tend to derive a “tetradrachm” of c. 14.5g and a "stater" of c. 7.25 g. It looks to me as if this copper is being read as being 15 of those staters as part of the binary system, with a reduced standard of c. 6.4g? I am inclined to suspect whoever made that judgement was confused. This copper looks to me much like the giant Ptolemaic coppers, and thus was sticking to the old decimal splitting. Thus a deben of 10 qedets – 1/5 of the old Syrian/Phoenician mina…… Thoughts anyone? Rob T[/QUOTE]