Sale: Triton VII, Lot: 346. Estimate $5000.  Closing Date: Monday, 12 January 2004.  Sold For $4250. This amount does not include the buyer’s fee.

SELEUKID KINGS of SYRIA. Demetrios I. 162-150 BC. AV Stater (8.57 gm). Antioch mint. Diademed head right / BASILEWS DHMHTRIOU SWTHROS, cornucopiae. SNG Spaer -; SMA -; Houghton -; Babelon, Rois -. EF, flan flaw on cheek. Apparently an unpublished variety without date. ($5000)

The Macedonian king Alexander III founded an empire with complex administrations and networks of mints for his new, "imperial" coinages. This tradition was continued by the successors of Alexander in the various independent kingdoms they carved from his immense territories. One of the larger and more diverse of these kingdoms was the Seleukid Empure, founded in Asia Minor and the Levant by Seleukos I. Because the cultures within Seleukos’ kingdom were so diverse, the coinage of the various mints display a remarkable variation in style, fabric, and design types that reflected the predispositions of local audiences. The two gold staters of the Seleukid king Demetrios I offered here (lots 346 and 347) illustrate this perfectly, as the first is of the cosmopolitan ‘western’ mint of Antioch, and the second is of the eastern provincial mint of Ekbatana. Though almost every element of the style and fabric of these coins is different, the two coins still retain a propagandistic consistency that is demanded by an imperial coinage.