Nomos 21

IONIA. Uncertain. Circa 600-550 BC. Stater (Electrum, 22 mm, 14.28 g), on the Milesian weight standard. On the left, two fierce looking animal heads with open mouths to right, facing, on the right, a horse-like figure walking to left, above an uncertain symbol. Of the two heads on the left, the lower one is certainly that of a lion; while the upper head, which is very different from the lower - its nose is oddly shaped, as is its mouth - is almost certainly a griffin. Rev. Three incuse punches with irregular interiors: an oblong rectangular punch between two smaller square punches. Unpublished, but for a hekte from the same series, see Gemini X, 2013, 100. Unique and of great interest and importance. An exciting and dramatic looking coin. A few minor marks, otherwise, extremely fine.

From a Swiss collection, first recorded in 2011 but acquired a few years earlier.

We owe a debt of gratitude to Dr. W. Fischer-Bossert for helping to elucidate the mysteries of this coin - he is in the process of preparing a proper publication on the series to which this coin belongs. This piece is the only known stater in a series that also includes an equally unique 1/3 stater, and some 1/6, 1/12 and 1/24 staters. Interestingly enough, WF-B points out that the die used to strike this coin was not, in fact, designed for staters but was, rather, a plate-like die intended to be used for striking smaller denominations (i.e., the two heads on this coin were meant to appear on two separate coins). This would have resulted in a rather cumbersome striking process, with the unstuck flans being positioned on top of this obverse die, held in place by the punch dies, and then struck. This is a technique that might well have made sense at the dawn of coinage (probably derived from dies with multiple designs used for jewellery) but must have rapidly been abandoned as overly complicated once coins began to be struck in ever greater numbers. As for the figure identified as a horse on the right, whether it really is, or was actually meant to be something else and its equine appearance merely an accident of striking, is somewhat unsure.
We would also like to thank Dr. Ute Wartenberg for her suggestion that the part of the obverse die that produced the lion's head on the obverse of this coin was also used to strike the hekte that appeared as CNG 97, 2014, 211.
During the cataloguing process the coin was analyzed non-destructively and its makeup, as percentages of 100, is as follows: Gold 50.79%, Silver 47.59%, Copper 1.11%, Bismuth 0.140% and Iron 0.136%.