Phoenicia, Byblos.   Shekel third quarter of V century BC, AR 13.42 g. Winged sphynx seated l. Rev. Hawk standing l., wearing the double crown of Egypt, holding crook and flail: in r. corner, olive sprig. All within slight incuse square. Lemaire-Elay, RBN 137, 30 = Elayi-Elayi 67 (1/3 shekel).
Apparently unrecorded. An issue of tremendous interest and fascination. Of excellent style,
minor areas of weakness, otherwise good very fine / very fine

This apparently unrecorded coin of Byblos illustrates the great eclecticism of Phoenician coinage and art in general in the fifth century BC. The obverse depicts a winged male sphinx wearing the pschent crown traditionally worn in Egypt as a sign of a pharaoh’s legitimate rule over Upper and Lower Egypt. Sphinxes wearing this crown are known from Egypt and Nubia, and the Great Sphinx at Gizah is thought to have originally sported this royal headdress. However, in all of these cases the sphinxes have no wings. This feature was a Phoenician addition to the essentially Egyptian type under the influence of Near Eastern griffin and winged monster motifs. Winged and pschent-crowned sphinxes are known from sculptural and ivory-work remains from Cyprus, an island with an important Phoenician population. The reverse type depicts a falcon wearing the pschent crown and carrying the crook (heka) and flail (nekhakha) emblems of pharaonic authority. In Egypt these symbols represented the pharaoh’s responsibility to shepherd his people and to maintain the fertility of the land. They were also attributes of Osiris and served as emblems of the pharaoh in death. Here they are paired with the crowned falcon, the symbol of Horus, the Egyptian god with whom the pharaoh was associated in life. The iconography of the falcon with crook and flail goes back before the 11th century BC in Egypt and was already internalized in the Near East by the 9th century BC, when it was used as a motif for locally produced scaraboids. Thus, by the time that the image was employed for this Byblian issue, it was already extremely old and had become a staple of Near Eastern iconography and lost much of its explicitly Egyptian quality. A remarkable addition to the reverse type on this coin, however is the olive spray in the upper right corner. This is clearly derived from Athenian tetradrachms circulating in the southern Levant and which are known to have exerted a strong influence on the development of coinage in Philistia, Samaria, and Judaea. The intrusion of the Athenian olive spray onto this otherwise Egypt-derived reverse type now raises questions about the owl with crook and flail that appears on coins of Tyre. Might the expected falcon have turned into an owl at Tyre under the influence of Athenian coinage, which of course employed an owl as its standard reverse type?