Silver hemidrachm from the Black Sea region of Chersonesos (Crimea)circa 480 -350 BC.

Very nice. I was looking at one of those in a CoinWorld ad not too long ago. Very interesting design.

It's one of the more popular `ancients' and fairly readily available. Although I haven't exactly conducted any systematic study of these, I haven't come across two with the same reverses yet!

This one of mine has an alpha / gamma monogram with a pellet above in one quadrant, and a tuny fish in another. The range of reverses is astonishing.

Ah, but Barry Murphy has!

http://bpmurphy.ancients.info/chersonese/Cherronesos.htm

I agree with you, Ian, these coins are compelling on many grounds. I was first drawn by the recumbant lion, which I identify with Miletos. It may be that when the towns were refounded after the Celtic invasions that they hired Milesians to make their coins. Perhaps they just used a commonly accepted symbol. In any case, to us, its the reverses that entice with questions.

Thanks for the link. I did have Barry's site bookmarked pre CC (computer crash). Unfortunately it was wiped along numerous others, and every single email i'd sent / received over the past ten years. I'm slowly rebuilding my database of internet reference sources but i've lost a relative mine of information gained through correspondence with numerous individuals over the years. Computer based memory in the form of hard drives, like human memory, is such a fickle thing.

Here is my example, this one has a bee on the reverse, as Ian notes, there are many different reverses of these and you can collect a theme of bees, amphorae, geckos etc. I am looking for a nice gecko example right now.