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Ancient Coins
A
BSOLUTELY
P
HENOMENAL
E
LLIS
, 110
TH
O
LYMPIAD
S
ILVER
S
TATER
,
CA
. 340 BC
Enlargement
1670 Elis, Olympia. 110th Olympiad. Silver Stater (12.14 g), 340 BC
. Laureate head of Zeus right.
Reverse:
F-A, eagle with folded wings stand-
ing right atop head of ram right; across field. A-P. Seltman 194 (dies CK/
); BCD Olympia 153; Kraay-Hirmer 505; Jameson 1244; Weber 4050 (all
from the same dies).
Extremely Rare and an absolutely incredible specimen!
Boldly struck in high relief with the bust of Zeus exhibiting
and amazing forceful portrait, th eagle on the reverse ready to take off! Slight doubling on the obverse with incredible beautiful light iridescent
blue overtones. An amazing coin worthy of a record price.
Superb Extremely Fine
.
Estimate Value ......................................................................................................................................................................... $30,000 - UP
From the Hanbery Collection; Purchased privately from F. Kovacs in 1991.
This coin belongs to what may be the earliest tradition of commemorative coin production for an athletic event. Indeed, it was struck for the pre-
mier athletic event of the Greek world - the Olympic Games held every four years to honor Zeus Olympios at Olympia in Elis. Although the religious
quality of the ancient games died out long ago, this tradition lives on in the variety of commemorative coins and medals still struck today every
time the modern Olympics come around.
Charles Seltman' s landmark study (1921) of the series has shown that the ancient Olympian staters were struck by two mints, one of which has
been linked to the temple of Zeus and the other to the temple of Hera in the large sacred precinct at Olympia. Around the end of the fourth cen-
tury BC, the mints seem to have been amalgamated and then moved outside of Olympia entirely. The staters, which are thought to have been
struck both as souvenirs and as money, were used during the Olympic Festival so that Olympia could profit from changing foreign coin brought by
visitors from throughout the Greek world.
The staters of Olympia were very limited in their iconography, normally restricting themselves to images of Zeus, his wife Hera, Nike, and Zeus'
sacred bird, the eagle. The often artful rendering of the types - especially the eagle - and the transmission of the coinage far afield by visitors
returning home led to frequent imitation. The influence of various forms of the Olympian eagle can be found on coins of Sicilian Akragas and
Euboian Chalkis, for instance. Likewise, the head of Olympian Zeus here lies behind the image of the god on the tetradrachms of the influential
Macedonian king Philip II.
This particular Olympian stater depicts the eagle standing on a ram' s head, but other issues in the Zeus/eagle series show the bird standing on an
Ionic column capital, a plain base, a hare, a fawn, a recumbent ram, a stag' s head, and a snake. This variation in perches appears to have served
as a form of control symbol for the mint.
A further notable feature of the Olympian coinage is the epichoric (local) alphabet used to inscribe the abbreviated ethnic of the Eleians. It still
includes an initial digamma (F), a letter with the same sound value as English W and which had dropped out of most other Greek alphabets long
before this coin was struck. Although Olympia was a magnet for the entire Greek world at festival time, this sort of alphabetic archaism reflects the
ironic position of Elis as a backwater region of mainland Greece.
(Cover coin)
.