The Parthian Coinage; (With Eight Plates.) (Paperback)

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1877 Excerpt: ...or even before that, quite debased and unintelligible, being evidently executed by a die-sinker who could not read them. From the ordinary copper coins all legends have disappeared, and are replaced by a mere square or circle of dots. But the tetradrachms, and those pieces of copper which bear the head or figure of a city, can be read to the last, and were unquestionably produced in cities where the Greek tongue was by no means dead. This class of coins, too, bears, in all cases, dates according to the era of the Seleucidae, while very few drachms of the Parthian Kings bear a date. The two series I have mentioned run parallel to one another, touching at but few points, so that it often is by no means easy to be sure with which tetradrachms some of the later drachms ought to be classed; the portrait is the only point in which the two series meet, and the notions of portraiture possessed by the artists of the tetradrachms differ entirely from those possessed by the artists of the drachms. It has long been conjectured, and I think rightly, that the tetradrachms and civic copper were minted at some of the great Greek cities of Central Asia, such as Seleucia and Charax, while the drachms were the State coinage of the Parthian Empire, and struck wherever there was-a Parthian garrison. On almost all the tetradrachms the King does not appear alone. He is usually in the act of receiving a palm or wreath from a female figure who wears a mural crown, and holds a sceptre or a cornucopise, and who clearly represents the mint city itself. I have already mentioned the fact that some of the later drachms bear a legend which is not Greek. Two letters of this language occur on the coins of Sanabares, at the beginning of the Christian era, and about a century later the reigni...