In 2005 Koray Konuk, the
authority on Cilician coinage, identified a new location for the production of
silver coin, Latmos.
Latmos is named after the
mountain it resides under, the peaks known today as the Besparmak mountains.
Indeed, the geographer Strabo (63BC - 24AD) actually calls the city Heraclea
under Latmos, although that is apparently a relocation approximately 1km to the
west of the original Latmos sometime after being conquered by Mausollos in the
4th century BC. During the 5th century BC it was part of
the Delian League.
Konuk initially published a
corpus of five coins, in three styles, all of the same basic design. On the
obverse is the portrait of a kouros, a boy, right, or occasionally left. Sometimes the head is bearded, others not, but there is no real support to Konuk's assertion of a female head. The reverse is a stylised
monogram of LAT with the T being over the twin peaks of the Greek letters of lambda
and alpha. It has been suggested that this arrangement is to reflect the
mountain(s) adjacent the city and the letter T is actually a denomination
indicator.
The coins are tiny, all known
specimens being tetartemoria, measuring around 6mm in diameter and weighing
around 0.15 grammes.
Since acquiring my piece, a variant
of Konuk’s issue B, I have tried to record all the specimens that come onto the
market and that number is still a relatively small population of 15 coins of
all styles. This number does include a number of new die identities.
