The city of Elis administered the sanctuary of Olympia and the Olympic games for most of antiquity. Sulla plundered the sanctuary's treasures in 86 BC to pay his armies during his War with Mithridates of Pontus...

The Heracles Papyrus (Oxford, Sackler Library, Oxyrhynchus Pap. 2331), a fragment of 3rd century Greek manuscript of a poem about the Labors of Heracles. Public Domain Image via WikimediaCommons. Before I dive in, a confession: I like books. Old, slightly yellowed books especially. This note started with a single question: Are books dead? By the end, you won't get a simple "yes" or "no", however, you will get a tour through ancient Latin words and a few data points. A Roman

When I read about the men who presided over the end of the Roman Republic, Caesar, Pompey, Antony, Octavian, Cassius, Brutus, the same question echoes: who was good and who was bad? I want to choose sides with Brutus. He was on the side of liberty - was he not? His coins say so in so many words - protecting Rome from the tyranny of Caesar. And then there are the events in Lycia, which question the practice of sorting historical figures into good and bad. Marc Antony's Oration

Ancient coins from auctions always have a dealer's attribution, sometimes tucked into the flip in tidy abbreviations. It can sometimes be dressed up to be very authoritative-looking and very often unreliable. Auction houses vary in their expertise, and even the best of them cannot be specialists in every series; everyone, eventually, makes a mis-call. The ticket is a starting point, as today's coin will illustrate. Here's what the dealer described Greek Mysia, Pergamon, AE ,

The Latin term dextrarum iunctio literally translates to "the joining of right hands" and serves as a symbol of fidelity, loyalty, reconciliation or unity of factions. Being a Roman emperor in the half-century after 235 did not promise a long and profitable career. The empire ran through some twenty-six emperors, nearly all of whom died by violence, most at the hands of their own soldiers. In 260, Valerian was taken alive by the Persian king Shapur, the only Roman emperor ev

An arched structure of access to the cavea of the Aigai theater. A canting type is a coin design that makes a pun on the name of the issuing authority, almost always a city, by depicting an object, animal, or plant whose Greek name sounds like (or is identical to) the city's name. The term "canting" is a modern name borrowed from heraldry, where "canting arms" (armes parlantes) do the same thing for a family name. Ancient visual puns: the city's name, spoken in pictures. You

Kaunian rock tombs near Kaunos (today Dalyan, Türkiye), carved directly into the cliff face around 400 BCE, their façades resembling temples, overlook the Calbis River (today the Dalyan River). If we start with the physical parameters of the coin (AR hemidrachm, 1.09 g) and its imagery: a helmeted head of Athena on the obverse; a short, sheathed sword, the city's ethnic, and a magistrate's name on the reverse, invite three immediate thoughts: It represents a self-governing Gr

A billon tetradrachm of the empress Tranquillina (Alexandria, AD 243/4) and a silver 5 lire of Vittorio Emanuele III (Rome, 1926) both showing a frontal eagle: wings spread and drooping, head turned to the side, the whole bird filling the field. On one the bird is perched on a wreath, on the other on a bundle of rods. One is heavy, debased silver, struck in Egypt under Roman rule. The other is good silver from Mussolini's Rome, dated 1926. They were minted nearly seventeen c

"When the Nile is in flood, it overflows not only the Delta but also the lands called Libyan and Arabian, in places as far as two days’ journey from either bank, and sometimes more than this, sometimes less. Concerning its nature, neither from the priests nor from any others could I learn anything." -Herodotus, The Persian Wars, II.19 Perhaps it isn't rocket science to answer the question - it certainly isn't hard to see an upside-down upper case uppercase Δ in this NASA pho

The World in the 8th Century In 750 CE the Umayyad caliphate of Damascus reached its greatest extent, stretching from the Atlantic to the Indus. The Umayyads were the ruling dynasty of the Islamic caliphate. The family, descended from Umayya of the Quraysh, had governed the empire from Damascus since 661 CE. The reigning caliph was al-Walīd I (r. 705–715). In 711 CE, the governor of Ifrīqiya, Mūsā ibn Nuṣayr, pushed west with a largely Berber force led by the Berber commande

The Asklepieion, an ancient healing center in a city once known as Pergamon and today Bergama, Turkiye. Image Source: Travel & Beyond The Asklepieion was the sanctuary and healing complex of Asklepios (Latin Aesculapius), the god of medicine. It was located just outside the city of Pergamon on the plain below the acropolis. It functioned as something between a temple, a spa, a sanatorium, and a teaching hospital. Along with the sanctuaries at Epidauros, the cult's "mother" s

"having received also from Hermes an adamantine sickle he (Perseus) flew to the ocean and caught the Gorgons asleep. They were Stheno, Euryale, and Medusa. Now Medusa alone was mortal; for that reason Perseus was sent to fetch her head. But the Gorgons had heads twined about with the scales of dragons, and great tusks like swine's, and brazen hands, and golden wings, by which they flew; and they turned to stone such as beheld them. So Perseus stood over them as they slept, an

Today's 2.1g coin of interest carries an unusual legend. The third line on the obverse, in confident thuluth script, runs the formula "khallada Allāhu mulkahā " : خَلَّدَ اللهُ مُلْكَهَا : "may God perpetuate her kingdom." The alif (ا) added at the end of the final word: ملكه becomes ملكها. The feminine suffix is not a mistake of the engraver. It is acknowledgment that the sovereign whose name fills the field - Sāti Beg Khān - is a woman. The coin was struck at Awnīk in 739 A

This little 2.27g coin from Patrae was made quickly, in quantity, at a moment, around the middle 30s BCE, on the edge of the war that would end the Roman Republic. Achaia, Patrae; circa 35 BCE, AR Triobol or Hemidrachm (15mm, 2.27g, 6h), Damasias, son of Agesilaus, magistrate. (15 or 16 of these coins in ACSearch) Obv: Head of Aphrodite (with features of Cleopatra?), right, wearing stephane, earringand necklace, her hair bound in a bun at the back Rev: ΔA/MACIAC in two lines

"The measure of contempt given our nation abroad (Italy, America, everywhere!), and after all deservedly so! — and this is decisive — because we tolerate this man's regime has become a factor for us of first-rate world political importance. Anyone who reads the foreign press for a few months must notice this. We are isolated because this man rules us in this fashion and because we tolerate it and whitewash it. No man or party who in any sense cultivates democratic, and at the

My coin of interest today was issued by Gaius Cassius Longinus, not long before Mark Antony defeated him at Philippi, where he committed suicide. Cassius is named as the leading instigator of the plot to kill Julius Caesar by Plutarch and Appian, but other sources lean to Brutus or are more vague. According to Plutarch, he had both personal and political grievances against Caesar. Cassius was married to Junia Tertia, the daughter of Servilia & Decimus Junius Silanus and half-

Today's coin of interest is a small provincial bronze with a portrait of Domitia wife of Domitian, pleasing green patina and a little dirt (literally and metaphorically). Suetonius was clearly not a big fan of Domitian - neither were the senators - when news of his death broke - Suetonius writes: "The senators on the contrary were so overjoyed, that they raced to fill the House, where they did not refrain from assailing the dead emperor with the most insulting and stinging ki

Silver Plaque with St. Paul Byzantine 550-600 CE. Public Domain Image with thanks to the NY MET. In the spring of 615 CE, in a Constantinople ringed by enemies, the imperial mint struck a coin that had no recent precedent. It was made of silver - a metal the city’s mint had largely abandoned for more than a century - and it carried, around the stepped cross on its reverse, a short Latin prayer that no Roman coin had ever borne before: dEUS AdIUtA ROmANIS ("God, help the Roman

A silver denarius of Septimius Severus, struck at the mint of Laodicea ad Mare between 198 and 202 CE, is a deceptively modest object - 17 millimeters in diameter and weighing 3.04 grams. The modesty underrepresents the significant geopolitical events at play. The first attractions are the fine style of the portrait, the cabinet tone, and the reverse legend VICTORIAE AVGG FEL. The coin carries a bearded portrait of the African-born emperor, advertising his self-claimed Antoni

The official story is that Romulus was taken up to heaven. On the seventh of July, Romulus was conducting a public sacrifice outside the city, at a place called the Goat's Marsh with the senate and most of the people present. A sudden storm broke. The sky darkened, a cloud descended to the ground, and violent winds and rain scattered the crowd. When the weather cleared, Romulus was gone. He was never found, alive or dead.