Help With Parthian? Coins Please.

Thanks for the heads-up Bob. I did wonder about the rough patch being bright. I'll definitely keep an eye on the reverse.

This last coin appears to be a drachm or ¼ unit of Kanishka (c. 128-150 AD). With it being in better condition than the others I thought it would be easier to identify, but I can't find a good match anywhere. Can anyone help? Thanks.

Indeed Bob, all the different gods can be confusing, and the limited on-line resources. I'd go with Oesho on this one, so I'm a bit further forward. Fingers crossed that Göbl's Kusanreiches does arrive soon.

Hopefully Kushanshah will stop by in the near future, and shed some more light on the coin.

Many thanks again,
Jim

Yes, Oesho/Siva. https://www.zeno.ru/showphoto.php?photo=96586

This one also came my way, and appears to be a Kanishka AE tetradrachm or unit. (c. 128-150 AD)

Obverse: Kanishka standing facing, holding spear and sacrificing at altar at left. Reverse: God of metals Athsho standing facing, with head turned to left, one hand on hip, the other holding out diadem, tamgha at left.

Diameter: 24 x 25 mm, and Weight: 15.9 gr. Going by the weight (on the CoinIndia site), it fits in with the Eastern "Kashmir" Series.

Wanted to get back to this fine thread now that I've finally found a few minutes to look through Göbl's Münzprägung des Kusanreiches and Sasanian Numismatics. In particular, I spent some time looking at the Kushano-Sasanian section of Kusanreiches.

It would seem that, as I suspected earlier, at least four of the five coins below are likely issues of Hormizd I Kushanshah - a.k.a. Hormazd/Ohrmazd, c. 270-300 AD:




Going by the illustrations in Göbl's corpus, coins #2, 3, 4, and 5 above cannot be Ardashir, Peroz I, Shapur I/II, Varhran, etc., since the busts of those rulers sport very different looking crowns/headgear on their coins. I'm not providing those images/types from Göbl here, but it seems unlikely that the rounded backs of the headgear on coins 2-5 above match the crowns of those rulers.

By process of elimination it seems to me that the coins above, with the possible exception of the first one (where the top of the crown is worn off), are Hormizd. Göbl's pics are small and grainy, which makes deciding on the specific Hormizd type (Göbl 1122, 1124, 1125 - which account for all of this king's AE's) rather challenging. As you see below, there are also many varieties for each type.

Below are pics of the relevant sections from Göbl's Münzprägung des Kusanreiches. Regarding the reference to "Kawad" for the 1122's and 1124's in the pics below, "Kawad may have been a local governor of Hormizd, as the bust appears to be of Hormizd, but the inscription on the coin reads Kawad (or Kobad). The coins are scarce to rare." (That's from a listing by Coinindia) The Kawad inscription, which is in Bactrian, seems to have often missed the small flans during the strike. The point is that coins struck by this governor Kawad are still properly attributed to Hormizd.

At the end of January I posted a picture of the frog pendant below, but didn't find out anything about it. I have since found a similar item in The British Museum web site.

The text from the description of the pendant listed in The British Museum may be of interest, as it has early Eastern/Islamic indications.

https://research.britishmuseum.org/...rchText=frog

Description:
Cast, circular copper alloy pendant showing a stylised frog, the front legs turned up and back legs turned down, encircled by two concentric friezes. The motifs of the inner frieze are defaced, but seem to comprise a pattern of alternating dots and lines. The outer, wider one is decorated with three framed, short, illegible Arabic - possibly Quranic - inscriptions, alternating with three circles each containing a bird. The reverse is plain. The broken suspension loop is flat at the back.
Culture/period Islamic
Date 12thC (circa)
Production place Made in: Afghanistan (Asia,Afghanistan)
Findspot Found/Acquired: Begram (Asia,Afghanistan,Kabul (province),Begram)
Materials copper alloy
Technique cast

Curator's comments:
Found in an unnumbered box of miscellaneous Masson collection ornaments and fragments.

Two similar specimens, different only in an openwork frog in the centre encircled by a single frieze, are known. The first, again encircled by an illegible Arabic inscription, is from an unspecified site in Uzbekistan and is assigned to the twelfth century. The other has a frieze decorated with a moulded undulating line, and was found in the vicinity of the c. 1st-13th-century cave site of Kashmir Smast, in north-west Pakistan. The resemblance between the Kashmir Smast, Begram and Uzbekistan pendants indicates a similarity in date; and further suggests that all three specimens could be Ghurid, since the sites where they were found were all part of the Ghurid empire in the 12th century.

It should be noted, however, that the frog motif dates back to remote antiquity. A miniature Bactrian seal in the shape of a hand has a frog on the palm. The seal comes from an undated plundered grave, but resembles an early 2nd-millennium BC hand-shaped seal (a surface find at Gonur, in Margiana, Turkmenistan), with a circle in place of a frog on the palm. The frog also appears on 3rd-2nd-century BC Indian punch-marked coins. After this date, it is not traceable until its re-appearance in the Islamic period.

There is a similar frog pendant on Zeno: https://www.zeno.ru/showphoto.php?photo=37823.