'Sensational' Egypt find offers clues in hunt for Cleopatra’s tomb

Thank you. Agreed to everything you said.

 

Log in or Sign up to hide this ad.

And rightly so.

 

In my post on imitative owls I quoted two references that note that Egypt made and used coins starting at least as far back as 412 BCE. The native Egyptians had a silver-based currency that was made up of coins that were imitative owls as well as scrap silver and copper (which of course is not really coinage as such).

Juan Carlos Moreno Garcia in "Dynamics of Production in the Ancient Near East": "The first coins mentioned in Egyptian texts were staters, i.e. Athenian tetradrachms, at the end of the 5th century BC; sometimes they are specified as 'str n Wjnn', Ionian staters. For the first time they appear on a Demotic ostracon from the year 13 of Darius II, that is 412 BC, from Ain Manawir near Dus in the south of Kharga oasis (Chauveau 2012)."

Peter van Alfen (Mechanisms, 2011) noted: "As the hoard evidence indicates, Egypt was the largest and most important market for Athenian owls in the classical period. It stands to reason that Egypt would also then be the largest producer of imitative owls, beginning probably in the last quarter of the fifth century and continuing until Alexander’s conquest. With only a couple of exceptions, coin production in Egypt before the Macedonians focused on imitative owls."

- Broucheion

 

Thanks for the data points. I stand corrected...

 

Thank you for the link to your post on imitative owls.

There seems to be a good number of Egyptian owls being sold as Athenian these days. The field is evolving and there appears to be confusion when it comes to attributing owls as Athenian or imitative, especially for the examples that closely follow the design of the Athenian originals.

I sometimes wonder if the imitative versus Athenian distinction will ever be settled for many of these coins.