Tricky. Very tricky. But I think I've found it.
For me, the first clue were the long necks. I mean, ridiculously long. There's one ancient nation that was notorious for portraits with inhumanly long, stringy necks depicted on them:
Bosporus, an ancient kingdom at the "fringe of civilization", on the far northern shore of the Black Sea, in what is now Crimea (owned by Ukraine) and the Russian coast. The Romans never formally claimed this territory, though the kings of Bosporus claimed the Empire to be their protector, and depicted the reigning emperor on the
reverse of their coins.
This coin was issued in the reign of King Rheskuporis V, who reigned from 304 to 342 AD and was the last Bosporan king to issue coins in any great quantity. The denomination is a "bronze stater"; the stater was originally a gold coin, which gradually became more and more debased with time and inflation, until these bronze coins were all that remained.
The obverse is the side with the "long-haired" portrait, holding a trident; the trident is distinctive of coins of this monarch, and the "long hair" is really turban-like headgear. On the Reverse, the faraway Roman emperor, Constantine the Great, is being crowned by a very crudely drawn Victory/angel figure. Underneath the emperor's portrait are some Greek letters, which is the date of the coin in the local calendar. Unfortunately, only the letter "K" is visible (the number "20"), but it does date the coin to sometime around about 620 Bosporan Era (circa 323 AD) It's very similar to
this example on CoinArchives, dated 622 BE, which went unsold at an estimate of 50 euros.
The Wikipedia article I linked to at the top of my post has a paragraph at the bottom on coins of this country, noting that, since the collapse of the Soviet Union, these coins have become much more common here in the West than they used to be.
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
Posted 01/14/2009 9:29 pm
