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Coin of the Month

November 2025: A new silver fraction of Tenedos?

The Coin of this Month is presented by Paul Seyfried-Russ


Over the past decades, new and previously unparalleled quantities of material have entered the ancient coin market. In particular, ancient base-metal and silver fractions have appeared with increasing frequency in auctions. Both coin dealers and scholars repeatedly encounter new, hitherto unknown coin types within this material. Our coin of the month for November is one such example.

The object in question is a silver coin weighing 0.78 g, struck on the “reduced” Phocaean standard, which was redefined a few years ago by P. van Alfen and A. Ellis-Evans as the “Trojan standard” (P. van Alfen - A. Ellis-Evans, Preliminary Observations on the Archaic Silver Coinage of Lampsakos in its Regional Context, 2018). The coin, classified as a trihemiobol, depicts on its obverse a double head: a bearded male face on the right and a beardless female face on the left. The two heads are connected by an earring and a shared headband. The eyes of the double head are archaic in style, almond-shaped, and comparatively large.


The reverse of our specimen shows another head, this time within an incuse square. The left facing head wears a Corinthian helmet and likewise displays archaic, almond-shaped, large eyes, together with a pointed beard that identifies the figure as male. Both the incuse square and the form of the eyes indicate an early minting period of the Tenedian mint. Comparable coin types are generally dated to the first half of the 5th century BC.


While the design of the obverse is typical of Tenedos, the reverse differs, as the parasemon (city emblem) of Tenedos – a double axe (bipennis) – is not depicted (CN-Type 13100). Apart from another identical specimen (CN-Coin 58148), only one further coin with the same motif is known: a didrachm bearing the same combination of obverse and reverse types (Cn-Type 13099). It is this didrachm that makes the identification of our fractional piece as one from Tenedos possible, since an ethnic inscription appears in the upper left field of its reverse.


Until recently our trihemiobol had been attributed to the polis of Lampsakos, which produced iconographically similar types, easily confused, especially when poorly preserved. Thus, the obverse could be mistaken for the double head of Lampsakos (both heads female), and the reverse for the head of Athena wearing a Corinthian helmet which is common on the silver fractions of Lampsakos (CN-Type 20590). The fact that both poleis struck silver coinage with similar weights at the same time and that the noted similarity in design was most likely not coincidental, made the identification of these two coins particularly challenging.



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