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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;Reid Goldsborough, post: 253, member: 34&quot;]Here&#039;s your chance to show off. Well, I&#039;m going to show off, anyway.&nbsp; I&#039;m going into lots of detail here -- doesn&#039;t mean anyone else has to.</p><p><br /></p><p>I don&#039;t know if this was my best coin buy, but my most recent really good buy with ancient coins was a Sabean imitation of an Athenian Owl that I bought through eBay from a guy in Lebanon infamous for his misattributions, halting English, and occasionally really good buys. Here&#039;s a picture from the seller, fairly small but large enough to see what the coin is:</p><p><br /></p><p><a href="http://rg.cointalk.org/misc/sabean.html" target="_blank" class="externalLink ProxyLink" data-proxy-href="http://rg.cointalk.org/misc/sabean.html" rel="nofollow">http://rg.cointalk.org/misc/sabean.html</a></p><p><br /></p><p>The seller described the coin merely as an Owl, apparently not knowing anything about it, its rarity, or its market value. Knowledge is power, as they say. The coin was actually struck not in Athens but in Saba, Southern Arabia, which is currently a part of Yemen, sometime during the 3rd or 2nd century BC. The coin is listed and pictured in David Sear&#039;s Greek Coins and Their Values (SG 6112) and elsewhere. The Z on Athena&#039;s cheek on the obverse is a Sabean denomination mark. I paid about one fourth of its market value.</p><p><br /></p><p>But here&#039;s the really interesting part. Saba is referred to as Sheba in the Old Testament, as in the Queen of Sheba (Sheba is the English equivalent of Sh&#039;va which is the transliteration of the Hebrew word for Saba). The story of King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba appears not only in the Bible but is also cited by various ancient Assyrian, Greek, and Roman writers. Hearing of his wisdom, the queen from the South traveled north, probably around 950-930 BC, to test the Israelite king with &quot;hard questions.&quot; The meeting was a success and the two nations began trading heavily with one another. The Sabeans also traded heavily with the Greeks, hence their copying the famous Athenian Owl tetradrachms some 700 years later.</p><p><br /></p><p>Athenian Owls were the world&#039;s first widely used international coinage. Minting began in the 6th century BC and continued without debasement though various design evolutions for half a millennium, an amazing run for a single coin motif. Their production helped finance the building of the Parthenon, and they were the principle medium of exchange for Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, among others whose thinking formed the very basis of our civilization. Athenian Owls were copied not only in Southern Arabia but also in Judea, Egypt, Syria, and Bakria.</p><p><br /></p><p>Athenian Owls are considered to be the most famous of ancient coins. They&#039;re fabulously high-relief -- sculpture-like. The obverse features Athena, goddess of both wisdom and warfare and patron of Athens, while the reverse features her attribute, the owl, still a symbol of wisdom today.</p><p><br /></p><p>Among the people enamored with the classical Athenian Owls, those minted between 449 and 413 BC, was President Theodore Roosevelt, who carried one as a pocket piece. It, along with the coinage of Alexander the Great, was his inspiration for redesigning U.S. coinage in the early 20th century. This led to the Golden Age of U.S. coins and the Saint, Walker, Standing Liberty quarter, the three most classical, and beautiful, of U.S. coins. <img src="styles/default/xenforo/clear.png" class="mceSmilieSprite mceSmilie1" alt=":)" unselectable="on" unselectable="on" />[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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