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Need Help Deciphering Legend On Pilate Prutah

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 Posted 04/11/2013  11:56 pm Show Profile   Bookmark this topic Add coinguy11 to your friends list Get a Link to this Message Number of Subscribers
I was wondering if anyone on the forum could tell me the word abbreviated with an "L" on the Pilate coin date. I know that translated it means "year" but I would like to know the actual word that the L stands for. I haven't had any luck with various combinations of verbiage in the search engines. Thanks in advance for any help you can give.
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echizento's Avatar
United States
23731 Posts
 Posted 04/12/2013  12:07 am  Show Profile   Bookmark this reply Add echizento to your friends list Get a Link to this Reply
to the community

Can you post a picture of the coin?
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sel_69l's Avatar
Australia
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 Posted 04/12/2013  01:06 am  Show Profile   Bookmark this reply Add sel_69l to your friends list Get a Link to this Reply
The 'L' is part of the date.
"LIZ" = year 17 = A.D. 30/31
"LIH" = year 18 = A.D. 31/32.
(ref. Sear).
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16868 Posts
 Posted 04/12/2013  02:41 am  Show Profile   Bookmark this reply Add Sap to your friends list Get a Link to this Reply
The alphabet used on ancient Egyptian and Palestinian coins is Greek. Greek has no letter shaped like our letter "L".

It follows therefore that this symbol is not an actual letter; it's there to denote "these letters are actually a year". Just like the lines above-and-below that people often use when writing Roman numerals, or the use of the keraia symbol in modern Greek numerals, make it obvious at a glance that the letters are to be interpreted as numbers, rather than letters.

Scholars debate the exact origin and derivation of the "L-for-year-symbol", with the dominant theory holding it to be derived from the word for "year" when written in Egyptian Demotic script. The use of this symbol to denote years is, as I said, restricted to Egypt and neighbouring Palestine. It was never used in the rest of the Greek-speaking world, such as on the coins of Tyre, Kyrene or other coinage series that used Greek numerals to declare dates. I don't even think it was used on Egyptian-controlled Cyprus. So an Egyptian-derived origin makes the most sense to me.

Another theory suggests it is a devolved Greek letter "E", since the Greek word for "year" is etous. But if this were the origin, one would surely expect many other dated coins from other places, far from Egypt, would also use this shorthand.

All of which is a long, roundabout way of saying, "Nobody knows". Sorry.
Don't say "infinitely" when you mean "very"; otherwise, you'll have no word left when you want to talk about something really infinite. - C. S. Lewis
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 Posted 04/12/2013  08:34 am  Show Profile   Bookmark this reply Add coinguy11 to your friends list Get a Link to this Reply
Thank you very much, I was mainly concerned that it was an archaic Greek or Latin word unfamiliar to me or an obscure aspect of the Seleucid dating system. Thanks again for your help.
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