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 Calbys River (today the Dalyan River). 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 Greek polis. It ref

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. The are minted nearly seventeen cen

"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