Summary of Lisa Kallet & John H. Kroll's The Athenian Empire

Everest Media

Description

Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book.
Sample Book Insights:
#1 The silver ore deposits in southeast Attica, which were abundant and of exceptionally high purity, were the main source of silver for the central and eastern Mediterranean world from the late sixth century through most of the fourth century BC.
#2 The city of Athens began minting silver coins around the middle of the sixth century. The coins were simple in design, having a pictorial type on one side and a crossed, square punch mark on the other. But around the teens of the sixth century, the city began to mint coins with national types on each face: the head of Athena wearing a helmet on the obverse, and her accompanying owl and a sprig of her olive tree on the reverse.
#3 The Athenian coinage changed to reflect the new political situation, and they were now minted with an image of Athena on one side and a three-letter legend on the other. They were also struck in large quantities, which allowed the Athenians to fund their fleet in preparation for the Persian invasion.
#4 The owls of Athens were struck on a massive and ever-expanding scale that surpassed the archaic coinage that preceded them. The minting estimate was more than 9,000 talents of silver, which was the output of 700 tetradrachm obverse dies.

Sujets

• COinS
• Coin

Informations

• Publié par: Everest Media LLC
• Date de parution: 03 mai 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781669397601
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Insights on Lisa Kallet & John H. Kroll's The Athenian Empire
Contents Insights from Chapter 1 Insights from Chapter 2 Insights from Chapter 3 Insights from Chapter 4 Insights from Chapter 5 Insights from Chapter 6
Insights from Chapter 1

#1

The silver ore deposits in southeast Attica, which were abundant and of exceptionally high purity, were the main source of silver for the central and eastern Mediterranean world from the late sixth century through most of the fourth century BC.

#2

The city of Athens began minting silver coins around the middle of the sixth century. The coins were simple in design, having a pictorial type on one side and a crossed, square punch mark on the other. But around the teens of the sixth century, the city began to mint coins with national types on each face: the head of Athena wearing a helmet on the obverse, and her accompanying owl and a sprig of her olive tree on the reverse.

#3

The Athenian coinage changed to reflect the new political situation, and they were now minted with an image of Athena on one side and a three-letter legend on the other. They were also struck in large quantities, which allowed the Athenians to fund their fleet in preparation for the Persian invasion.

#4

The owls of Athens were struck on a massive and ever-expanding scale that surpassed the archaic coinage that preceded them. The minting estimate was more than 9,000 talents of silver, which was the output of 700 tetradrachm obverse dies.

#5

In the 460s, Athens began minting didrachms in addition to the usual tetradrachms, drachmas, obols, and hemiobols. These imposing coins with a spread-winged owl on the reverse were minted in some quantity.

#6

The production of the owl silver coinage increased dramatically in the fifth century, as the last of the Early Classical owls gave way to the Standardized coinage of the second half of the century.

#7

The tetradrachms illustrated in Figure 2. 7 are typical of the Standardized minting phase, which was characterized by several distinctive forms of the helmet palmette. The phase was well documented in the Malayer hoard, a large cache of Greek coins unearthed in western Iran in the 1940s.

#8

The Athenian owls were minted in large quantities, and the appearance of the coinage was sacrificed to the needs of intensified mass production. Some of the later fifth-century die-engraving is especially odd and produced helmeted Athena heads that are so ill-proportioned and irregular in design that some scholars thought that these owls were foreign imitations.

#9

The Athenian Decree on Coins, Weights, and Measures, around 414 BC, authorized the reminting of the silver coinages of its allies into Athenian owls. The surge in hasty, substandard die-cutting may have occurred before or around that time, making it tempting to ask whether the surge might have resulted from Athens’ program of reminting the silver coinages of its allies.

#10

The Laureion silver industry was producing 20 metric tons of silver per year by the fifth century, enough for the minting of 1.