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20 IMITATIONS OF ATTIC COINS THE EVOLUTION of the imitation of Athenian coinage allows us a means of ingress into the subject of how the unraveling ofAthenian hegemony affected the use ofmoney in the Aegean basin and more widely in the eastern Mediterranean. The phenomenon of coins that copied the type of Athenian coinage with varying degrees of fidelity is surprisingly widespread. 1 Many thousands of imitations of Attic tetradrachms that circulated alongside genuine Attic coins in the Near East and Egypt were minted. The existence of these good-quality copies of Attic tetradrachms was not always owed to an intent to deceive recipients, inasmuch as the issuer often possessed a near approximation of the requisite silver (sometimes supplemented by gold) to implement his program of minting or any other emission with an appropriate weight and value for his coins.f And that is not to mention the cases in which these coins have a deliberately caricatured appearance that suggests that no particular effort was being made to dupe their users.' Accordingly, the purpose of 1 Many of these coins were discussed in E.T. Newell, Miscellanea Numismatica:Cyrene to India,NNM 82 (NewYork 1938)53-55,59-75,82-88. An excellent surveyof the utilization of the owl of Athena as a coin type by non-Athenians isprovided by H. Nicolet-Pierre, "L'oiseau d'Athena, d'Egypte en Bactriane: Quelques remarques sur l'usage d'un type monetaire a l'epoque classique," in L. Kahil, C. Auge, and P. Linant de Bellefonds (eds.), Iconographic classique etidentites regionales, BCH Suppl. 14 (1986) 365-76. 2 This estimation of the quality of pseudo-Attic coinage is based on the research of J.Diebolt and H. Nicolet-Pierre, "Recherches sur lemetal de tetradrachmes atypes atheniens," SNR56 (1977) 79-91, where the results of analysis by neutron activation of several groups of Attic and pseudo-Attic coins are summarized. The salient feature of pseudo-Attic coins is their greater variability when compared with probable authentic issuesof the Athenian mint. Coins from the second half of the fourth century that betrayed their non-Attic provenience by legend or caricatured style were compared with a group of contemporary coins likely to be genuine. The imitations possessed a markedly higher proportion of copper. It is hard, however, to estimate the effect of such variation on the intrinsic value of the coins, since they also often contained higher percentages of gold. If these coins are assessed in terms of their bullion value, their higher proportions of gold more than offsetthe adulteration with copper of their component of silver. Most are at least as valuable as contemporary emissions of the Attic mint. When the anonymous pseudo-Attic coins of the late fifth and early fourth centuries are juxtaposed with their fifth-century stylistic analogues, the higher proportion of copper is again noticeable, although it isless than that of the fourth-century imitations. The proportion of gold is lower than in the fourth-century pseudo-Attic coins and more than likely genuine issues. Some of these coins may be slightly lessvaluable than their authentic analogues. 3 The continuum of imitation spans faithful reproductions of Attic coins struck in Egypt to pieces like the Gazan tetradrachms of ca. 400 that use the Euboeicl Attic standard and IMITATIONS OF ATTIC COINS 529 these coiners of pseudo-Attic currency often does not seem to have been to exploit the users of Attic coinage, but to supplement the stock of Attic coins in circulation. In many other cases, however, those issuing copies of Attic coins intended their coins to circulate alongside genuine Attic money without calling attention to themselves. The division between the faithful and the perfunctory imitators seems to have resided in the degree ofregular penetration by genuine Attic coins into the local economy ofthe minter. Perfunctory minters had no incentive to minimize differentiation of their own imitations from the few Attic coins in local circulation; they merely strove to offer currency in a familiar, widely accepted form. Their handiwork is notably of less interest to us, because perforce it has less to do with Aegean monetary conditions. In general, the need to provide copies of Attic coins necessarily implies that there were economic contexts in which the expectation of the partners to an exchange of goods was that the proper monetary medium was to be Athenian coins. That some parties to such exchanges were forced to go to the trouble and expense of minting imitations of Athenian coins demonstrates that...

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