Sale: Triton XII, Lot: 388. Estimate $30000.  Closing Date: Monday, 5 January 2009.  Sold For $27500. This amount does not include the buyer’s fee.

PTOLEMAIC KINGS of EGYPT. Berenike II, wife of Ptolemy III. Circa 244/3-221 BC. AR Pentakaidekadrachm (51.71 g, 12h). Alexandreia mint(?). Struck under Ptolemy III, 246-221 BC. Veiled and draped bust right / BAΣIΛIΣΣHΣ BEPENIKHΣ, cornucopia, bound with fillet, between two laureate pilei. Svoronos 988 and pl. XXXV, 2; D. Vagi, “The Ptolemaic Pentakaidekadrachm,” SAN XX.1 (1997), pp. 5-10; H.A. Hazard, Ptolemaic Coins (Toronto, 1995), c1052 (dodecadrachm); SNG Copenhagen -; BMC -. EF. Very rare, especially without the usual flan crack.

This series raises a number of important questions: upon which weight standard were the coins struck, which Berenike does the series commemorate, and for what purpose were the coins issued? Beginning circa 310 BC, Ptolemy went off the Attic standard, reducing the weight of the tetradrachm from 17.2 g, first to about 15.7 g and then circa 290 BC to about 14.4-14.2 g. Called the Ptolemaic standard by modern numismatists, this standard remained in effect until the first century BC. The Ptolemies thereby apparently established a separate circulation area, driving out Attic standard coins and forming a closed economy. The coins of Berenike present a possible anomaly in this system, since the series appears to have been divided between the Ptolemaic and Attic weight standards. While no one has seriously denied that the smaller coin in this series is an Attic standard pentadrachm, the larger coin has caused more difficulty. Based on a single known incomplete specimen, Svoronos proposed that it was struck on the Attic weight standard and called it a dodekadrachm, a view Mørkholm (with reservations) and Hazard accepted. Vagi, however, examining the weights of a number of newly discovered specimens, argued that the coin was struck on the Ptolemaic standard, calling it a pentakaidekadrachm. That Alexandreia remains the accepted source for these issues (Attic and Ptolemaic) is a further complication, since it remains unclear why the main Ptolemaic mint would have revived the long-discontinued Attic standard.

The series has traditionally been attributed to Berenike II, the daughter of Magas of Kyrene and wife of Ptolemy III Euergetes. Hazard has proposed instead that it honored Berenike Syra, the sister of Ptolemy III and widow of the Seleukid king, Antiochos II Theos. Hazard argues that the coins were struck in Syria from locally-acquired silver to pay the Ptolemaic army deployed there to press the claim of Berenike’s child to the Seleukid throne, though the two had been murdered in the interim, and that, as pay, these coins were carried back to Egypt by the soldiers. The use of the long-discontinued Attic standard, he argues, implies a provincial mint rather than Alexandreia. There are increasingly subtle arguments in favor of each position, and the issue remains the subject of continuing debate.