Coin minting from Ephesus
The ancient city of Ephesus is one of the most important and oldest coin producers in Asia Minor in ancient times. Since the first coins, coinage has only known very few different motifs. Characteristic of the urban coinage is the bee, the attribute of a natural deity living there, who over time has been equated with the Greek goddess Artemis. As a rule, silver coins were minted in different denominations .
History of the coinage of Ephesus
The start of the minting activity is difficult to determine. It is believed that coins were struck in Ephesus as early as the 7th century, under the rule of the Lydians , because the oldest coin hoard ever found was found in the foundations of an archaic temple in Ephesus. It is reasonable to assume the origin of at least some of the coins in this hoard here, but it is difficult at this time to actually assign individual objects to their minting locations based on their iconography.
- The 6th century BC Chr.
Only the introduction of silver money made it possible, at least in Ephesus, to allocate coins to the minting location relatively safely. Because only the connection between the location and the matching of the motif ensures the allocation. In this case the deciding factor is the appearance of the bee on the coin face. This is only the case in large numbers in the course of the 6th century. A few years before the beginning of the rule of the Achaemenids over Ephesus (from 541 BC) the Ephesians began to mint silver coins that show the said bee on the obverse and a stamped four-part square, a so-called quadratum incusum , on the reverse . Rarely, instead of the bee, one finds an eagle's head and the letters epsilon and phi , which form the beginning of the city name. The denominations of all these coins are small, in any case no larger than a drachma . The coinage used is Phoinikisch .
- The 5th century BC Chr.
Despite the many political changes that the 5th century brought to Ephesus, coinage changed only insignificantly. Neither the Ionian rebellion , nor the end of the Achaemenid rule, nor the restrictive policy of the Attic-Deli Maritime League left any recognizable traces on the coins of Ephesus. The dominant motifs remain the bee, eagle head and quadratum incusum , the denominations remain small and the coinage does not change either. But the city name can be read more and more often on the coins.
- 415 to 334 BC Chr.
Only the entanglements and aftermaths of the Peloponnesian War led to certain innovations in the minting activity: On the one hand, after the catastrophic outcome of the Sicilian expedition , the currency standard was introduced by Rhodes in order to facilitate corresponding trade relations. On the other hand, the first tetradrachms were minted a few years later. This could be traced back to the fact that Ephesus, as the base of the Spartan general Lysander , had achieved greater prosperity and greater autonomy. The motifs on the coins also changed at the beginning of the 4th century. The quadratum incusum disappeared around 400 BC. From the back and was replaced by a deer, usually as a protome , and a palm tree. A magistrate name was added. The bee continued to dominate the front. This change probably resulted from the gradual equation of the Ephesian goddess with Artemis, because the deer is her favorite animal, and Leto is said to have given birth to Apollon and her under a palm tree. This special type of coin will be continued unchanged for around 100 years. However, there was also another important issue. Between 394 and 391 BC Some Greek cities, including Byzantion , the cities of the islands of Samos and Rhodes as well as Ephesus, issued a coin with a Heracles boy choking a snake on the obverse and the letters sigma , ypsilon and ny (for SYNMAXICON, the reference for a symmachy ) demonstrate. A city-specific symbol can be seen on the back, in the case of Ephesus a bee. This coin is the only known reference to an anti-spartan alliance of various cities in Asia Minor, which reacted to a defeat of Sparta in 394 and tried to shake off the already loose Spartan rule. The self-determination gained lasted only a few years, as early as 387 BC. The Achaemenids regained sovereignty over Asia Minor and its cities. However, the change did not have a recognizable influence on the minting activity of Ephesus.
- Hellenism
Around 330 BC The identification of the Ephesian deity with Artemis can be regarded as complete. Because in the course of the Hellenization of Asia through the campaigns of Alexander the Great , a coin was minted in Ephesus, which instead of the bee bears the head of the Greek Artemis with bow and quiver on the obverse. The stag was embossed on the back with a small bee and a magistrate's name. In the decades after Alexander's death in 323 BC Until the beginning of the Attalid rule over Ephesus in 189 BC. The city was subject to the complications of the Diadoch Wars . Many rulers had coins minted here, such as Lysimachus , various Seleucids and Ptolemies , but there was always an independent, autonomous Ephesian coin production that continued to produce the already known types, either with bees and deer or with Artemis and deer on the front and back Back. These were now minted using the Attic coin base and all also had a magistrate's name on the reverse. A special coin, a drachma with a bee and epsilon and phi on the front and deer, palm and magistrate on the back, was so popular that it was copied in Arados , off today's Syrian coast. Shortly after the introduction of the cistophores by Eumenes II , however, the production of this coin also ceased. That meant the end of the independent stamping activity of the city. However, the mint was used by the Attalids and from 133 BC onwards. Used by the Romans for their coin issues.
literature
- Barclay V. Head : On the Chronological Sequences of the Coins of Ephesus . In: Numismatic Chronicle 1880, pp. 85-173.
- Barclay V. Head: Historia Numorum. A Manual of Greek Numismatics . Oxford 1911.
- Stefan Karwiese : The coinage of Ephesus . In: Paulys Realencyclopadie der classischen Antiquity Science (RE). Supplementary volume XII, Stuttgart 1970, Col. 297-364 (commentary).
- Colin M. Kraay : Archaic and Classical Greek Coins . London 1976.
- Stefan Karwiese : The coinage of Ephesus 2nd series 7 to 11 (5th-4th century BC). Corpus and structure of the Greek city coinage with all recordable stamp evidence as well as numismatic analyzes and chronologies (publications of the Institute for Numismatics and Monetary History, Volume 20), Vienna 2019, ISBN 978-3-85161-215-8
