By Oliver Hoover for American Numismatic Society (ANS) ……
Everyone loves to find coins in unexpected places. There’s a certain thrill that comes from discovering dropped coins on a city sidewalk or loose change behind the couch cushions.
The thrill is even greater when the find is more unusual or esoteric, like a bronze follis of Maurice Tiberius (ruled 582–602 CE) found cemented into a Byzantine wall when I worked at the site of Aphrodisias in the late 1990s, or an English East India Company pice found at an original Mormon settlement in Salt Lake Valley. Coins in strange places are great things.
Nevertheless, it has always been of some personal disappointment to me that there never seemed to be many examples of Seleucid coins in odd places, excluding those that survived the centuries to be restruck as Jewish coins of the Bar Kokhba War (132–135 CE). This all changed a few months ago when I discovered the June 17, 1882, issue of Scientific American.
According to a brief news item in the magazine, earlier in 1882, a farmer in Cass County, Illinois, discovered a Seleucid bronze coin on his land. Now, it is well known to ancient historians that the Seleucid Empire covered a vast territory, which at its greatest extent reached the shores of the Aegean Sea in the west, Central Asia in the east, the Caspian Sea in the north and the gates of Egypt in the south, but there has never been any suspicion (to my knowledge) that it extended as far as the American Midwest. The coin from Illinois—erroneously described in the article title as Roman!—was subsequently shown to the American ethnologist F.F. Hilder, who determined that it was an issue of Antiochus IV Epiphanes (175–164 BCE), the archvillain of the Hanukah story.
The piece was not illustrated in Scientific American, but Hilder described it clearly as depicting “on one side a finely executed head of the King, and on the obverse [sic] a sitting figure of Jupiter [Zeus], bearing in his right hand a small figure of Victory [Nike], and in his left a wand or scepter, with an inscription in ancient Greek characters—BASILEOS ANTIOCHOU EPIPHANOUS, and another word, partly defaced, which I believed to be NIKEPHOROU.”
When faced with such a report, two questions immediately leap to mind. What in the world is a Hellenistic coin of Antiochus IV doing in late 19th-century Illinois?And, of course, which precise type is it according to Seleucid Coins: A Comprehensive Catalogue?
To answer the second question first, the portrait of Antiochus IV is combined with the reverse type of an enthroned Zeus holding Nike and a scepter only on quasi-municipal coins of Antioch on the Sarus (SC 1379) and Apamea on the Axios (SC 1427), and on a royal issue struck at Antioch on the Orontes (SC 1887).
Since the quasi-municipal coins only carry legends naming the civic issuing authority (i.e., ANTIOXEΩN ΠPOΣ TΩN ΣAPΩI and AΠAMEΩN ΠPOΣ TΩN AΞIΩI), they must be discarded as potential types for the Illinois find. The royal issue is a much better fit since it features the legend BAΣΙΛΕΩΣ ANTIOXOY EΠIΦANOYΣ, which accords with Hilder’s reading.
However, it does not include NIKHΦOPOY or any other additional epithet. If there really was a second epithet on the Illinois find coin, then it must represent an unpublished variety, but perhaps the exergue monogram may have been misinterpreted as a fragmentary legend due to wear.
If the coin from Illinois was indeed an example of SC 1887 then Hilder was only half right to identify it as an issue of Antiochus IV. While this type features the portrait of that king, the forms of its control monograms combined with the treatment of Nike facing towards Zeus have led Seleucid numismatists to conclude that it was actually a posthumous issue produced at Antioch in the troubled period between the flight of the usurper Alexander I Balas from the city in 146 BCE and the advent of his rival Demetrius II Nicator in 145. Although Antiochus IV was thoroughly vilified in Jewish tradition, his memory enjoyed some popularity in Syria. Indeed, Alexander himself had previously managed to seize the Seleucid throne in 150 BCE in part by claiming to be a son of Antiochus IV.
The first question is much more difficult to answer. There is no serious basis for entertaining the possibility of pre-Columbian contact between the Seleucid Empire and North America, despite the occasional dubious claims of such for the Roman Empire. At the same time, it seems highly unlikely that Seleucid bronzes were ever jingling in the pockets of the various French, British, and American traders, soldiers, and settlers who passed through or made homes in Illinois beginning in 1682.
In the absence of other evidence, several possible explanations for the unusual find present themselves but none is especially satisfying. The coin might be a piece that was lost by an Illinois coin collector, although the circumstance of loss on a farm seems odd. Alternatively, the coin might have been salted in the farmer’s field as a practical joke to create a sensational news item. Perhaps the coin was mixed in with ship’s ballast taken on in the Middle East and then carried to North America, but how it then traveled from the East Coast to the Midwest remains mysterious.
We will probably never know how a coin of Antiochus IV Epiphanes ended up in an Illinois farmer’s field in 1882, but the fact that it did should stand as a warning to all numismatists everywhere: Always pay attention to what’s on the ground when you stroll down the street, hop on the subway, or rev up the tractor. What you find might surprise you.
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