Greek Coin Bought In Lebanon

Hello and welcome.

There were indeed a large number of kings named "Antiochus" who ruled over what is now Lebanon. Your coin depicts on the reverse Apollo, seated on the omphalos rock, with a bow. Antiochus I, II, III, IV and VI all made coins of this general design, mostly silver but a few in bronze. Antiochus I or III would be my guesses, based purely on probability as theirs are most common.

So, is it genuine? I would have to be skeptical. It is illegal in Lebanon to sell genuine ancient coins to tourists, so on that basis alone it is most likely a reproduction - selling reproductions is perfectly legal. People can and do smuggle genuine ancient coins out of Lebanon, but they don't usually use the tourist route to do so.

It would also depend on when you obtained it, because the Lebanon government has not always had control over all of its territory - civil wars and invasions from neighbouring states have meant that, at certain times, enforcement of Lebanese law was impossible. However, if you were there as a tourist, I'd suspect that it was relatively peaceful and stable and Lebanese law would have been in full effect.

I'd still be skeptical - anyone selling tourist souvenirs would be worried that you might be a government agent from the Ministry of Antiquities, and only offer you replicas, even if they swear to you that they were genuine. I haven't been to Lebanon, but most countries in the Middle East have similar laws, and have a similar attitude towards selling fake/replica ancient coins.

I've been to Turkey, and every ancient site in Turkey has a mini-mall of street hawkers at the gate selling tourist souvenirs, including "ancient coins". If you tell them that you know those are all fake, they'll give you a sly look, and pull another box of coins out from under the table, this time with pricetags in hundreds of euros. These, too, will all be fake, but much better quality fakes.


We don't really know what the names and nominal face values were for most ancient Greek bronze coins. Some Greek states at the time seemed to have a monetary system of 8 chalkoi to the obol, and 6 obols to the drachm (so 48 chalkoi to the drachm) - but how many chalkoi a specific coin might have been tariffed at, or even if they called them a "chalkos" at all ("chalkos" is simply the Greek word for "copper") is usually unknown - the coins themselves don't say, and if anybody back then wrote that kind of thing down, it has not survived. Unlike for silver coins, there is no obvious direct correlation between a coin's weight or size and it's intended denomination; bronze coins were essentially government-issued tokens. We could give them artificial labels, or best-guess labels, but they'd most likely be wrong.

So we normally just classify them by diameter. Your coin is 13mm diameter? Then it's an "AE13".

I agree. The photos are not good but looks genuine to me. There are many many millions of ancient coins around the ancient mediterranean. A government can ban their sale but they will continue to be found. And sold.
In some places those bans are a formality, because a government signed some agreement. Will only be activated when they want to grab some very valuable item. If you do not mind the law, and the value is low, who will bother with it?