Well now, the history of the stater is well known and documented by
archaelogists and numismatists. The coins, found all over the Mediterranean
and Europe and as far away as India and Central Asia, were originally minted
by Alexander the Great. The horse represents his stallion Boukephalos,
reputed to have been the finest horse ever bred; some Arabian bloodlines are
supposed to trace all the way back to him. The first staters were issued
while Alexander was still alive. Many others were minted by the successor
regimes into which his empire split, most notably the Ptolemys of Egypt and
the Seleucids of Syria. In the years that followed, as staters moved along
the trade routes, they were widely copied and imitated, and became as much
general currency as the U.S. dollar today. But the imitators did not have
the same skill or artistic concepts as Alexander's minters, and they altered
the images on the stater, vastly simplifying the horse until it resembled a
random collection of blobs of wax dripped from a candle. They also
completely mangled the Greek inscriptions into nonsensical chicken tracks,
which is probably all the Greek meant to them anyway. Staters coined in
Gaul were still circulating a thousand years later among the Arabs. [I'll
provide documentation for this later if anyone is interested.]
So I seriously doubt that the Carthaginian staters contain maps of the
world. I'm not challenging the possibility of Punic
exploration/colonization of the Americas; if anyone from that time could
have done it, it would have been the Phoenicians or Carthaginians. But
please note that Dr. McMenamin is a geologist, not an archaeologist or
linguist, and remember that these waters are extremely deep and extremely
treacherous...
----- Original Message -----
From: "J Taylor" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Sent: Monday, August 07, 2000 4:25 PM
Subject: [CTRL] Ancient Coins May Map New Understandings of Antiquity
> >http://www.mtholyoke.edu/offices/comm/vista/9606/4.html
> >
> >Ancient Coins May Map New Understandings of Antiquity
> >BY KEVIN McCAFFREY
> >
<snip>
> > It was his interest in the Carthaginians and Phoenicians as explorers
> > that led McMenamin to study the gold coins, known as staters. ...
<snip>
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