Since my first note (November 2020) on countermarks of Attic standard tetradrachms, I have added three more coins, so my notes needed some...

February 19, 197, the armies of Septimius Severus and Clodius Albinus clashed in Lugdunum (modern Lyon, France), and concluded the civil...

Perhaps it is not surprising in these notes pages that Lais of Corinth attracted my interest because of the reverse of an ancient coin....

Seleucid King Antiochus The Great (223-187 BC), expanded his empire by installing Artaxias as the governor (strategos) of Greater Armenia...

The winged bull's head crown of this Nezak Shah is worth a closer look. These eastern neighbors to the Sasanians left behind many coins,...

According to this US Inflation Calculator , which must be good because it was ranked highest by Google, if I purchased a coin in 1978 for...

Boeotia provides an early example of representative and federated democracy. "Ancient democracies and federations of states" is a theme...

Some questions are best avoided. When faced with three beautiful coins, it seems that asking "Which is fairest?" is perhaps not a good...

The coin I initially used to illustrate this was pretty ugly, nearly unidentifiable. I have since replaced it with a much nicer coin:...

I wrote an earlier post on Rome v. Parthia - in May 53 BC, when at Carrhae, Mesopotamia a member of the Sūrēn (Surena) family won a...

Eventually this post will reach two denarii that were issued to commemorate Julius Caesar's victories in the Gallic Wars with Celtic...

This post starts with a few thoughts on the ingredients that make up an attractive ancient coin and will eventually get to a coin of...

An event during Alexander the Great's conquest of the Achaemenid Empire is potentially depicted on the reverse of my coin today, with a...

The featured coin today is a tetradrachm of Nero from Antioch. It is dated by both the regnal Year of Nero (RY 8) and by a Caesarean Era...

At the end of the reign of Rabbel II, King of Nabatea (78-106 AD), in 106 AD, Trajan annexed his kingdom and created the Roman province...

There is no better illustration of the cursus honorem, the political career ladder in the Roman republic, than a coin from a moneyer who...

I have been slowly adding Cistophoric tetradrachms from various cities in Asia minor, and today was looking back at one of my first posts...

It is a new year, 2022! Appropriately, today's post opens with new beginnings and Aeneas arriving from Troy to the shores of Italy and...

After wandering a bit into medieval Islamic coins and the Mongol khans of the 13th and 14th century, I inevitably return to 1st century...

The Parthians are mostly known from the writings of their Greek and Roman enemies - not the writers you would trust to document Parthian society and achievements objectively. Even the Sasanians who succeeded them in the East in the 3rd century AD preferred to emphasize their ties to the Achaemenids rather than the Parthians who were a bit too Greek. Arsakes began the empire and his dynasty in the mid 3rd Century BC leading the Parni and capturing the neighboring region o