Nabataean coinage
Encyclopedia
Aretas II
Aretas II was the King of the Nabateans. Succeeding Rabbel I, his reign began in 103 BCE and he ruled until 96 BCE. Aretas II was a contemporary of the Hasmonean king Alexander Jannaeus, whose expansionist policies were a direct threat to the Nabatean Kingdom...
, c. 110 - 96 BC but it was his heir Aretas III
Aretas III
Aretas III was king of the Nabataean kingdom from 87 to 62 BCE. Aretas ascended to the throne upon the death of his brother, Obodas I, in 87 BCE. During his reign, he extended his kingdom to cover what now forms the northern area of Jordan, the south of Syria, and part of Saudi Arabia...
, who at the time was in control of land extending to Damascus
Damascus
Damascus , commonly known in Syria as Al Sham , and as the City of Jasmine , is the capital and the second largest city of Syria after Aleppo, both are part of the country's 14 governorates. In addition to being one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities in the world, Damascus is a major...
. The silver
Silver
Silver is a metallic chemical element with the chemical symbol Ag and atomic number 47. A soft, white, lustrous transition metal, it has the highest electrical conductivity of any element and the highest thermal conductivity of any metal...
coin
Coin
A coin is a piece of hard material that is standardized in weight, is produced in large quantities in order to facilitate trade, and primarily can be used as a legal tender token for commerce in the designated country, region, or territory....
age is based on the weight of the Roman
Ancient Rome
Ancient Rome was a thriving civilization that grew on the Italian Peninsula as early as the 8th century BC. Located along the Mediterranean Sea and centered on the city of Rome, it expanded to one of the largest empires in the ancient world....
Denarius
Denarius
In the Roman currency system, the denarius was a small silver coin first minted in 211 BC. It was the most common coin produced for circulation but was slowly debased until its replacement by the antoninianus...
or Greek
Greece
Greece , officially the Hellenic Republic , and historically Hellas or the Republic of Greece in English, is a country in southeastern Europe....
Drachma , as the adjacent areas around Nabataea used the Greek weight system, it is presumed the coins are of this standard. The local name of the denominations are not known so the Latin
Latin
Latin is an Italic language originally spoken in Latium and Ancient Rome. It, along with most European languages, is a descendant of the ancient Proto-Indo-European language. Although it is considered a dead language, a number of scholars and members of the Christian clergy speak it fluently, and...
denarius and Greek
Ancient Greek
Ancient Greek is the stage of the Greek language in the periods spanning the times c. 9th–6th centuries BC, , c. 5th–4th centuries BC , and the c. 3rd century BC – 6th century AD of ancient Greece and the ancient world; being predated in the 2nd millennium BC by Mycenaean Greek...
drachma equivalents are used interchangeably.
Some authors state it to be based on the Phoenicia
Phoenicia
Phoenicia , was an ancient civilization in Canaan which covered most of the western, coastal part of the Fertile Crescent. Several major Phoenician cities were built on the coastline of the Mediterranean. It was an enterprising maritime trading culture that spread across the Mediterranean from 1550...
n drachmae instead on the Attic
Attica
Attica is a historical region of Greece, containing Athens, the current capital of Greece. The historical region is centered on the Attic peninsula, which projects into the Aegean Sea...
drachmae weight standard . Most common is the small bronze
Bronze
Bronze is a metal alloy consisting primarily of copper, usually with tin as the main additive. It is hard and brittle, and it was particularly significant in antiquity, so much so that the Bronze Age was named after the metal...
coinage of between 5–25 mm in diameter, which was in use at the same time as the coins of Judaea
Judea
Judea or Judæa was the name of the mountainous southern part of the historic Land of Israel from the 8th century BCE to the 2nd century CE, when Roman Judea was renamed Syria Palaestina following the Jewish Bar Kokhba revolt.-Etymology:The...
.. The name of these coins is unknown but they do correspond with the common bronze coins issued at the time in the Greek area of influence.
Silver
With a weight of roughly 4.5 grams the coins was issued by most of the kings, with the king and his wife on the obverse and either king or female figure on the reverse.Denominations come in 1 Denarius/Drachmae and a quarter of the unit at a weight of 1 gram on average.
Some examples of coins are:
- MeshorerYa'akov MeshorerProfessor Ya'akov Meshorer was the Chief Curator for Archaeology at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem and a prominent Israeli numismatist.-Early life:...
96, 4.555g, 15.0mm, 0o, Petra mint, 19 - 20 A.D. - Meshorer 103, aVF, usual flat strike, 3.88g, 14.3mm, 0o, Petra mint, 25 - 26 A.D.
Lead
LeadLead
Lead is a main-group element in the carbon group with the symbol Pb and atomic number 82. Lead is a soft, malleable poor metal. It is also counted as one of the heavy metals. Metallic lead has a bluish-white color after being freshly cut, but it soon tarnishes to a dull grayish color when exposed...
coins
COinS
ContextObjects in Spans, commonly abbreviated COinS, is a method to embed bibliographic metadata in the HTML code of web pages. This allows bibliographic software to publish machine-readable bibliographic items and client reference management software to retrieve bibliographic metadata. The...
were issued with the king on one side and a bull or with a God (Nike?) on the other and sometimes the kings image replaced with a god (Zeus?)
Bronze and Copper
Usually depicting the king with or without his wife on the obverse and a crossed cornucopiaCornucopia
The cornucopia or horn of plenty is a symbol of abundance and nourishment, commonly a large horn-shaped container overflowing with produce, flowers, nuts, other edibles, or wealth in some form...
on the reverse. Aretas usually wore a laureate and faced right, a veiled Queen Shuqailat behind him.