★ "Land of the Date Palm" ★

Sicily, Siculo-Punic AR Tetradrachm. Entella, circa 345/38-320/15 BC. Head of Tanit-Persephone to left, wearing wreath of grain leaves, triple-pendant earring and necklace; four dolphins around, small scallop shell below chin / Horse walking to right; date palm in background. Jenkins, Punic 134 (O45/R120); de Nanteuil 411 (same dies); HGC 2, 282. 17.03g, 25mm, 1h.

Near Mint State; wonderful old cabinet tone over lustrous, satin-finish surfaces. Very Rare; only six other examples offered at auction in the past twenty years, all of inferior condition and metal quality.

From the Long Valley River Collection;
Acquired from Sonja Lambert;
Privately purchased from Arnumis Sprl (Anne Demeester) prior to 2005.

The enormously wealthy Carthaginian Republic, first and foremost a commercial thalassocracy, made no use of coined money until the invasion of Sicily in 410 BC brought their armies into a direct confrontation, only for the second time after an earlier conflict in 480 BC, with the great city states of Greek Sicily. Not before then had Carthage experienced the necessity of striking coins, which we must assume arose from the requirement to pay the army which included many Italian and Greek mercenaries. That the techniques and inspiration for the earliest Siculo-Punic coins were Greek, and particularly Syracusan, in origin is obvious from the employment of a head of Tanit closely resembling Arethusa, and the style of the engraving that cannot but have been the work of Greek artists, at least initially.

While the casual observer might be forgiven for mistaking the obverse of the present type for a Syracusan issue, the reverse is characteristically Carthaginian in iconography. The horse is commonly believed to allude to the foundation myth of Carthage mentioned by Virgil (Aeneid I, 442ff) and later Justin (Epitome of Pompeius Trogus, 18.5), wherein a horse's head was discovered in the ground at the foundation of the city and was interpreted as an omen of the future city's prosperity and military power. Alternative interpretations of this symbol have also been proposed, such that the horse is a symbol of Baal Hammon, chief god of Carthage and probably associated with warfare and the sun (a theory supported by the depiction on later coins of the horse in conjunction with a solar disc), or that the horse is a more general reference to the military purpose of the coinage.

Unambiguous however is the use of the date palm, called 'phoinix' by the Greeks. Because this economically important fruit-tree was abundant along the southern Levantine coast, the Greeks already in the time of Homer had come to know the region as Phoenicia ("Land of the Date Palm"). Thus the date palm came to be synonymous with Carthage itself, the greatest of all the Phoenician states. It is unclear what term the Carthaginians used to refer to themselves, however the appropriation of this exonym was evidently considered expedient to visually identify the issuing authority of this coinage to its intended recipients.