Tortoise

Thank you orfew, I have been after one of these for the longest time.

Thanks Bob

Crab, cost me £4
http://www.tantaluscoins.com/coins/108419.php

Very nice chunky coin. Great present. Happy Anniversary.

A very interesting coin...
with a great history behind!
Aegina was a great rival of Athena, and when athenian soldiers captured Aegina they instaured a new puppet gobernment to rule Aegina.
The "tortoises" represented on Aegina´s coinage were "Testudo Testudo", a kind of sea tortoise of the Mediterranean sea to signify that they were "masters of the waves"...
Athenians very quickly changed the design to this depicting a "Testudo Graeca" to signify that the days of glory for Aegina at the sea had passed away...

In spanish we have only one word to design a sea turtle or a land turtle, they all are "Tortugas" for us...
what is the land turtle; ¿"turtle" or "tortoise"?

The earliest coins of the Greek homeland were struck at relatively few mints. Though it is impossible to know which Greek city-state was the first to strike, the honour probably belongs to Aegina, an island off the coast of Attica whose people excelled as sailors and merchants. The first Aeginetan staters, bearing a sea-turtle with spider-like flippers and a narrow, shield-shaped carapace with a row of pellets, are now thought to have been struck c.555-550 B.C. The reverse of these rare pieces has a small, deep incuse square with thin, raised, criss-crossing ridges. Though the fine details of this coinage changed with each subsequent issue, the basic design remained consistent for centuries. The next issue, produced c.550-530 B.C., shows a sea-turtle with a heavy collar; on its reverse the raised dividers of the incuse assumed the familiar 'Union Jack' pattern. This type went through at least five developments from c.530 to c.450 B.C. The shell on some is decorated with a wavy 'trefoil' collar (rather than a straight one), and the final issue of this grouping often is described as "T-back" because the central rib of pellets and the two pellets at the trefoil collar resemble the letter "T". Mixed within the early turtles of c.550-530 and c.500-490/80 B.C., are 'proto tortoise' coins, which depict a tortoise with a shell that is segmented and shaped like a shield. Sometime in the mid-5th Century the staters of Aegina assumed a distinctly different look, as the turtle was permanently replaced by a land-tortoise with a segmented shell. The 'Union Jack' incuse punch remained a fixture, though the incuse areas were now comparatively shallow and the raised bars were especially thick. The bars eventually became thinner, and various symbols and letters were placed within the sunken areas. On some of the late staters, generally dated from c.350 into the 320s, the island's ethnic, AI, appears in the obverse field flanking the tortoise, or within the incuse portions of the reverse, abbreviated as AI, AIGamma; or AIGamma;I Though minting of the tortoises seems to have ended by the late 4th Century B.C., they continued to circulate widely, with some of the last issues being buried at least as late as the mid-2nd Century.

(this text has been taken from an auction of ars classica (74))