Archaios | Lydia Magnesia ad Sipylos Tyche Cybele | Rare | AE | i38.21

Description

Archaios Numismatics
Description:
Semi Autonomous Provincial Bronze coin of Magnesia ad Sipylum in Lydia. Circa AD 238-244.
Obverse:
Turreted and draped bust of Tyche right ; ethnic MAΓNHCIA around.
Reverse:
Cybele standing left between two lions, holding patera and drum (tympanum) ; [MAΓ]NHTΩN CIΠ-Υ-ΛΟ-Υ,
Mint:
Magnesia ad Syplum, Lydia
Size:
19 mm
Weight:
2.87 g
Ref:
SNG Copenhagen 254
Condition:
VF/aVF. A very interesting and Rare type !
Use the Pictures as your judge as grading is subjective.
Inventory#:
1910.38.21
Notes:
Magnesia ad Sipylum (Sipylos)
was an ancient town in Lydia, Asia Minor (in Modern Turkey) located above a stream anciently called the Pidasus, which flows into the Hyllus about fifteen miles above its junction with the Hermos. It was originally a settlement of Hyrcanians from the neighbourhood of the Caspian sea, transported to Lydia in Persian times, and in the similarly named 'Hyrcanian plain'. Under Seleucid rule it received a Macedonian garrison who also settled in this district, whence they are called by Pliny the Elder "Macedones Hyrcani" .
Lydia
was one of the provinces of Asia Minor bordering in ancient times both the Mediteranean and the Euxine or Black Sea.
The ‘The Lydians,’ says Herodotus (i. 94),
‘were the first people we know of to strike coins of gold and of silver’
and Xenophanes of Colophon bears witness to the same tradition.
Passing from these statements of ancient writers to an examination of the earliest Asiatic essays in the craft of coining, we are led to ascribe to the seventh century B.C., and probably to the reign of Gyges (B.C. 687- 652), the founder of the dynasty of the Mermnadae and of the new Lydian empire, as distinguished from the Lydia of more remote antiquity, the first issues of the Lydian mint. These are bean-shaped ingots of the metal called by the Greeks ‘electrum’ or ‘white gold’, a natural com- pound of gold and silver, collected at Sardes from the washings of the little mountain torrent Pactolus, and perhaps from diggings on the slopes of Tmolus and Sipylus. Ingots and rings, &c., of the precious metals adjusted to fixed weights had been used for purposes of exchange for ages before the Lydians first invented the convenient process of stamping them with marks as guarantees of value. Ingots thus stamped henceforth passed freely as current coin, and, so long as they were correct in weight, the exact amount of pure gold in each lump of metal does not appear to have been taken into consideration. The generally accepted rate of exchange between pure gold and silver stood in these times as 13.3 to 1, and the mixed metal, ‘electrum,’ of very variable quality, was roughly estimated at the rate of about 10 to 1, a convenient proportion which enabled bankers and money-changers to make use of a single set of weights for electrum and silver, and which accounts for the fact that the weights of the electrum staters correspond with those of the later silver staters, and depend upon the standard which happened to be in use for weighing silver in bullion and afterwards in coin in various districts (see supra, Ionia, p. 564). These standards were, in Lydia, the so-called Babylonic (stater 168 grs.) and the so-called Phoenician (stater 220 grs.).
Some excerpts from Head, Hist. Num.; Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia
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