AR hemiobol, late 5th/early 4th cent BC, Obverse - Male head right with Carian inscription, Reverse - Head of goat right
Ancient Greek coins can prove problematic to attribute with certainty, even by academics and museum curators. This can be particularly so when the name of the mint city is incomplete and compounded with uncertain find spot locations.
Take, for example, the small coin above. In the 1890's it was attributed to an issue by Abdemon in Salamis on the island of Cyprus and it appeared in the BMC Greek Cyprus volume when it was published in 1904, numbers 42-44. However, that was not the only attribution given to these pieces and Kebren in Troas was also suggested and you find the type in the 1894 BMC Greek Troas volume, number 14.
These two competing attributions stood until the 1980's when Hyla Troxell identified that the script on the coins contained a letter that only occurred in Carian script, an S form made of two overlapping C's. She also had the benefit of some find spot information that strengthened a Carian origin for the coins. She pitched for the mint being located at Halikarnassos.
The relatively recent decipherment of Carian script points to these coins having an ethnic beginning "azo". That would appear to rule out Halikarnassos. The recent translation of an inscription from Sekkoy points to another location in the right vicinity, the city of Kasolaba, sited somewhere between Halikarnassos and Mylasa. The missing guttural initial of the Carian ethnic "azo" is not unknown in the language and is not apparently surprising.
So, the new coin producing poleis of Kasolaba is now the preferred mint city for this prolific issue of diminutive hemiobols, c.0.45 grammes in weight.
