Academic literature on the topic 'Second century BC Ptolemaic Egypt'
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Journal articles on the topic "Second century BC Ptolemaic Egypt"
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Roller, Duane W. "A note on the Berber head in London." Journal of Hellenic Studies 122 (November 2002): 144–46. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/3246209.
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AbstractThe well-known ‘Berber Head’ in the British Museum, found at Kyrene in 1861, has long defied exact stylistic analysis. Its findspot provides no precise date, and ever since the excavators suggested that it was a piece from the fourth century BC, this dating has been sustained, generally through inertia. Yet recent scholars have become increasingly aware of the weakness of this date without offering specific alternatives other than a gradual down-dating. Its North African features indicate that it is a portrait of an indigenous ruler, and thus attribution must be based on the likelihood of such a person being honoured in Kyrene. It is herein suggested that it is a portrait of the Numidian prince Mastanabal, son of Massinissa, and that it dates to the time that Massinissa was a close associate of the king of Kyrene, the future Ptolemaios VIII of Egypt, or 163–148 BC. Mastanabal was a noted athlete and thus the piece may be a commemoration of one of his victories. Its commissioning would fit into his father's vigorous hellenization policy. Although the style remains difficult of analysis, certain features, especially the beard under the chin, support a second-century BC date.
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Mueller, Katja. "Dating the Ptolemaic city-foundations in Cyrenaica. A brief note." Libyan Studies 35 (2004): 1–10. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0263718900003708.
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AbstractThis article discusses the origin of the three dynastic settlements, which the Ptolemies (re) founded in Cyrenaica: Arsinoe-Taucheira, Ptolemais near Barca and Berenike near Euesperides. The evidence for the dating of the foundation of Ptolemais is re-examined and a papyrological text introduced, which has so far been ignored by previous scholars. This text unambiguously attests citizens of Ptolemais near Barca as early as 252 BC in Egypt. It refutes the commonly accepted argument that all three Ptolemaic cities were founded under Ptolemy III Euergetes (246-221 BC) and within the same framework of administrative-political concerns. It will be suggested that Ptolemy I Soter had the motifs, opportunity and resources to found Ptolemais as early as the end of the fourth century BC. Several papyri further emphasise that despite the almost simultaneous demise of Euesperides and rise of Berenike nearby, ethnic designations for these two cities were simultaneously in use throughout Ptolemaic Egypt until at least the end of the third century BC.
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Fischer-Bovet, Christelle. "EGYPTIAN WARRIORS: THEMACHIMOIOF HERODOTUS AND THE PTOLEMAIC ARMY." Classical Quarterly 63, no. 1 (April 24, 2013): 209–36. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s000983881200064x.
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The role and status of the Egyptians in the army of Hellenistic Egypt (323–30b.c.) has been a debated question that goes back to the position within Late Period Egyptian society (664–332b.c.) of the Egyptian warriors described by Herodotus asmachimoi. Until a few decades ago, Ptolemaic military institutions were perceived as truly Greco-Macedonian and the presence of Egyptians in the army during the first century of Ptolemaic rule was contested. The Egyptians were thought of as being unfit to be good soldiers. Egyptians would have been hired only as late as 217b.c.to fight against the Seleucid king Antiochus III in Raphia. The Ptolemaic victory (in fact rather a status quo) was made possible thanks to the addition of twenty thousand Egyptians to reinforce the Greek army. For a long time the subsequent role of Egyptians in the Ptolemaic army in the second and first centuriesb.c.did not attract much attention. One usually assumed that they were ‘second-rate soldiers’ calledmachimoi. In recent decades, the scholarship on Ptolemaic Egypt, notably Demotic studies, reasserted the role of Egyptians in the Ptolemaic army from the late fourth century onwards.
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Agut-Labordère, Damien. "l’oracle et l’hoplite:les élites sacerdotales et l’effort de guerre sous les dynasties égyptiennes indigenes." Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 54, no. 5 (2011): 627–45. http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/156852011x613993.
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Abstract This work proposes a new interpretation of the Chapter 10 of the so called Demotic Chronicle, an oracular text written in Egyptian Demotic and dated from the end of the IVth century BC. A gloss concerning the rule of Nektanebo I denounces the fiscal reforms of the Crown to finance the containment of the Achaemenid assaults against Egypt. This passage finds an echo with the reform of the Egyptian tax system undertaken by the Athenian Chabrias quoted by the Pseudo Aristotle. Both show that the necessity of the payment of a mercenary army drove to an improvement of taxation which prefigures the Ptolemaic reforms of the IIId century B.C.
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Monson, Andrew. "Money in Ptolemaic Egypt: Front the Macedonian Conquest to the End of the Third Century BC by Sitta Von Reden." Classical Journal 105, no. 2 (2009): 177–80. http://dx.doi.org/10.1353/tcj.2009.0048.
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MacLachlan, James. "The Role of Astronomy in the History of Science." International Astronomical Union Colloquium 105 (1990): 45–46. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0252921100086371.
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This historian of science offers a few samples of the kinds of understandings his students will be subjected to. (a) In early times, Britons used careful observations of astronomical events to establish their calendar; (b) In the 4th century BC, Aristotle used the spheres of Eudoxus to establish his cosmological principles; (c) In the second century of our era, Ptolemy made astronomy scientific, partly for the sake of astrological predictions; (d) In the fifteenth century, Columbus used crude astronomical observations to find latitude, (e) In the sixteenth century, Copernicus revised Ptolemaic astronomy in order to improve its fit with Aristotelian cosmology, and in the process challenged that cosmology; (f) Kepler used Tycho’s more precise data to destroy heavenly circularity; (g) In the early seventeenth century, Galileo based his renovation of motion studies on the investigative style he learned from Ptolemy, coupled with mathematics learned from Euclid and Archimedes.
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Harris, Lynda. "Visions of the Milky Way in the West: The Greco-Roman and Medieval Periods." Culture and Cosmos 16, no. 1 and 2 (October 2012): 271–82. http://dx.doi.org/10.46472/cc.01216.0245.
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Before the new Greek cosmological system was developed, many ancient cultures had pictured the Milky Way as a vertical axis or tree, which was seen as a route leading into the heavens of a layered universe. This model began to change from about the sixth century BC, when the image of a spherical earth and geocentric universe became increasingly widespread among the educated people of Greece. The new model, standardised by Ptolemy during the second century AD, visualised a universe comprised of eight concentric crystalline spheres surrounding a fixed earth. By the Middle Ages, the Ptolemaic system had become the established picture of the cosmos in Europe and the Islamic world. Losing its old vertical image, the Milky Way was now pictured as a circular band surrounding the spherical earth. Now known as the Milky Circle, it kept something of its earlier religious significance in the pagan world. In Rome it was visualised as a post-mortem place of purification, located below the sphere of the moon. With the establishment of traditional Christianity, the Milky Way’s position became unclear. It had always been a scientific puzzle to thinkers trying to analyse its substance and define its place in the Ptolemaic universe, and its true nature remained unresolved. In one of its most intriguing identities, originated by the thirteenth century astrologer Michael Scot, it migrated to the sphere of the fixed stars where it became a mysterious, living constellation, known as the Daemon Meridianus.
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Miranda, Catarina. "“I have seen a face with a thousand countenances”: Interpreting Ptolemies' mixed statuary." Revista do Museu de Arqueologia e Etnologia, no. 33 (December 12, 2019): 3–14. http://dx.doi.org/10.11606/issn.2448-1750.revmae.2019.169503.
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Around the time the postcolonial paradigm was establishing in the Humanities, so too was the Ptolemaic period receiving growing attention. Scholars studying this chronology, during the second half of the twentieth century, however, understood Egypt’s society and culture as a set of impermeable communities/ traditions, only coexisting with one another. This interpretation caused a radical turn in the historiography of the topic. More significantly, though, it left material culture that did not belong exclusively to neither one of the cultural sets (Greek or Egyptian) largely overlooked, and, later on, underestimated in the debates on who influenced who. The author’s Master dissertation took as a case study the Greco-Egyptian stone sculpture in the round of the male Ptolemaic rulers, looking to further understand the epreviously underestimated objects. They were not underestimated, however, in the sense that their existence was not acknowledged or analysed, but in the sense that the explanation put forward was not complex enough. The authors formulated their interpretation mainly from the point of view of state and elites, disconsidering thus other possible realms of agency. This article presents a part of the investigation, namely the theoretical framework adopted to suggest another interpretation for the existence of the “mixed” statuary of Ptolemaic rulers. Although today Ptolemaic Egypt is not understood as a colonial case, postcolonial studies will contribute to this alternative line of interpretation by decentralizing analysis, from the state to other groups. Nevertheless, the major contribution will come from a theory of consumption, which in turn aims to decentralize studies, from issues of power to other realms.
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Fahmy, Abdelrhman, Eduardo Molina-Piernas, Javier Martínez-López, Philip Machev, and Salvador Domínguez-Bella. "Coastal Environment Impact on the Construction Materials of Anfushi’s Necropolis (Pharos’s Island) in Alexandria, Egypt." Minerals 12, no. 10 (September 28, 2022): 1235. http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/min12101235.
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The only example and reference of Ptolemaic Alexandrian tombs, with clear integrations of Egyptian-style scenes and decorations, is considered an endangered archaeological site due to different coastal environmental risks in Alexandria and the absence of maintenance. Anfushi’s Necropolis is located near the western harbour (Island of Pharos) and dates back to the 2nd century BC. Sea level rises, earthquakes, flooding, storminess, variations in temperature, rainfall, and wind are the factors that have the largest effect on the destruction and decay of Anfushi’s Necropolis building materials. This paper’s main objectives were to characterize this necropolis’s building materials and assess its durability problems and risks regarding the coastal environment. Additionally, the vector mapping of its architectural and structural elements was applied for documentation and recording purposes for the necropolis. To achieve these aims, field (recording and photographs), desk (engineering drawing and mapping), and laboratory works (X-ray diffraction, X-ray fluorescence, binocular microscopy, polarizing microscopy, and scanning electron microscopy) were carried out. The results confirmed the probabilistic risk of sea level rises and its impact on the submergence of Anfushi’s Necropolis. The structural deficiencies of the tombs were caused by the effect of earthquake tremors along with anthropogenic factors. In addition, chemical and microscopic investigations showed that salt weathering (halite and gypsum) induced the decay of the building materials.
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Balakhvantsev, Archil S. "Findings of Seleucid and Ptolemaic coins in Dagestan and the Problem of the Caspian Waterway." Vostok. Afro-aziatskie obshchestva: istoriia i sovremennost, no. 4 (2022): 230. http://dx.doi.org/10.31857/s086919080021236-6.
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In 1964 and 1985 in the south of Dagestan, two treasures were found, which included Hellenistic coins. The first consisted of several dozen Seleucid coins, of which only two bronze coins of Antiochus IV, the so-called “Egyptianizing” series, have survived. The second hoard included bronze Ptolemaic coins of the 6c and 6e series, issued in the first third of the 2nd century BC and related to the same type: Zeus-Ammon / two eagles perched side-by-side on two thunderbolts with a double cornucopiae in the left field. The most probable reason why Seleucid and Ptolemaic bronze coins ended up in Sharakun was the participation of their owners in trade along the Caspian waterway. Apparently, their masters arrived from Antioch on the Orontes and Alexandria to Sharakun, intending to follow the Caspian Sea and up the Oxus to Greco-Bactria. The bronze coins they had there would not only be absolutely useless, but also very burdensome. Therefore, merchants could either leave them with a reliable person in the Sharakun settlement, or bury them in a secluded place to pick them up on the way back. However, they, apparently, were not destined to return to Sharakun. After this became clear, the Ptolemaic coins, which were of interest to local residents only for their weight, turned out to be part of the foundry hoard. For us, both Sharakun treasures are the most valuable evidence, proving not only the very existence of the Caspian waterway, but also the implementation of trade contacts between Central Asia and the Eastern Mediterranean.
Books on the topic "Second century BC Ptolemaic Egypt"
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Reden, Sitta von. Money in Ptolemaic Egypt: From the Macedonian Conquest to the End of the Third Century BC. Cambridge University Press, 2010.
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Bowman, Alan, and Charles Crowther, eds. The Epigraphy of Ptolemaic Egypt. Oxford University Press, 2020. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198858225.001.0001.
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The book contains twelve chapters, by various authors, discussing aspects of the Greek and Egyptian bilingual and trilingual inscriptions from Egypt during the Ptolemaic period, from the conquest by Alexander the Great (332 BC) to the death of Kleopatra VII (30 BC). It is intended as a complement to the publication of the full texts, with up-to-date commentaries and images, of about 650 inscriptions on stone. These include major decrees of priestly colleges, such as the Rosetta Stone, and a great variety of religious and secular monuments from the whole of Egypt, from Alexandria to Philae. The subjects covered include the latest technologies for digital imaging of stone inscriptions, the character of Egyptian monuments with Greek text, the survival and collection of bilingual monuments in the nineteenth century through excavation and the antiquities trade, religious dedications from Alexandria and elsewhere, the civic government of Greek foundations and public associations, the role of the military in public epigraphy, verse epigrams, onomastics, and palaeography. Overall, the collection offers a comprehensive review of the social, religious, and cultural context of the great inscribed monuments of the Ptolemaic dynasty which are key sources for understanding the coexistence of two different cultures and the impact of Ptolemaic rule and Greek immigration in Egypt.
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Money in Ptolemaic Egypt: From the Macedonian Conquest to the End of the Third Century BC. Cambridge University Press, 2007.
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Erbstreit Papyri: A Bilingual Dossier from Pathyris of the Second Century BC. Peeters Publishers & Booksellers, 2017.
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Publishers, Museum. Notebook: Mummy Mask, Late Ptolemaic Period-Early Roman Period, 1st Century BC, Egyptian, Egypt, Cartonnage, Gold Leaf, and Pigment. Independently Published, 2020.
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Waterfield, Robin. The Making of a King. Oxford University Press, 2021. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198853015.001.0001.
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The book is a biography of Antigonus II Gonatas, king of Macedon from 276 to 239, and a history of the Greek mainland in the third century BCE. It falls into two parts. The first part covers the salient history of the decades preceding Antigonus’s accession to the throne, including what little is known of his early life, and the second part is a partly chronological, partly thematic account of his reign. The first part, which begins roughly with the death of Alexander the Great in 323, focuses on the history of Macedon, Sparta, Athens, the Aetolian and Achaean Confederacies, and Ptolemaic Egypt. The main recurrent themes of the second part are warfare (Antigonus vs Celts, Antigonus vs the Ptolemies of Egypt, Antigonus vs the Greeks, Antigonus vs Alexander of Corinth), administration (Antigonus’s reformation of Macedon, Antigonus’s methods of controlling the Greeks), and culture (Antigonus’s court). Antigonus emerges as one of the great kings of ancient Macedon, who stabilized the country after a period of chaos and held powerful foes at bay. But the successes of his early years as king were offset by the increasing power of the Greek confederacies, and his legacy was the perpetuation of the hatred the Greeks felt for their Macedonian overlords. This in turn ultimately made it possible for the Romans to replace the Macedonians as the arbiters of the Greeks’ fate.
Book chapters on the topic "Second century BC Ptolemaic Egypt"
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McGing, Brian. "Guerilla Warfare and Revolt in Second Century Bc Egypt." In Unconventional Warfare from Antiquity to the Present Day, 219–30. Cham: Springer International Publishing, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-49526-2_11.
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Thompson, Dorothy J. "Foundation Deposits from Third-Century BC Egypt." In The Epigraphy of Ptolemaic Egypt, 94–113. Oxford University Press, 2020. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198858225.003.0007.
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The chapter discusses inscribed bilingual dedicatory plaques made of metal, glass, and clay which were deposited as part of the foundation ritual of temples in Alexandria and elsewhere. It offers analysis of the traditions from which they came, the nature of the plaques themselves—their number, the materials of which they were formed, the writing and scripts that they bore—and the more general historical significance of the dedicatory practice in which they were involved. Plaques so far discovered are from a limited period in the second half of the third century BC; the dedications they record are royal dedications of temples, shrines, and other related structures, made to a variety of local gods; although the majority of examples are from Alexandria and immediately neighbouring areas, it is notable that this was not a phenomenon confined to the capital (examples survive from elsewhere in Egypt—from Taposiris Magna, along the coast to the west of Alexandria, and from Koussai in Middle Egypt).
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Baralay, Supratik. "Hellenistic Sacred Dedications." In The Epigraphy of Ptolemaic Egypt, 114–26. Oxford University Press, 2020. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198858225.003.0008.
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Dedications of physical objects placed in a sanctuary or some other space sacred to the gods were very common in all places and at all times in the Graeco-Roman world. While a number of these dedications were not inscribed, many dedicators chose to make a written record of their act of dedication, usually upon the object itself. This chapter sets out the typical formats employed in Greek sacred dedicatory inscriptions during the Hellenistic period. It then discusses in detail a pair of documents: an inscribed marble plaque from Alexandria dated to the mid-third century BC and an inscribed limestone stele from Krokodilopolis (Arsinoe) in the Fayum, dated to the mid-second to mid-first century BC It shows that although both inscriptions are part of a wider Hellenistic epigraphic koine, they exhibit features that are peculiar to the sacred dedications of Hellenistic Egypt and arose due to particular social processes at work there.
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Fraser, Peter M. "The Ptolemaic Garrison of Hermoupolis Magna." In Old and New Worlds in Greek Onomastics. British Academy, 2007. http://dx.doi.org/10.5871/bacad/9780197264126.003.0005.
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This chapter examines the personal names of people in the garrison town of Hermoupolis Magna in Middle Egypt in the last quarter of the second century BC. It evaluates whether it is possible to determine where the soldiers of the garrison came from based on their names alone. The findings suggests that the absence of ethnics, along with the survival of rare Greek names, may reflect a long-term settlement in the area.
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Południkiewicz, Anna. "“Megarian” bowls from Tell Atrib." In Classica Orientalia. Essays presented to Wiktor Andrzej Daszewski on his 75th Birthday, 425–40. DiG Publisher, 2011. http://dx.doi.org/10.37343/pcma.uw.dig.9788371817212.pp.425-440.
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Hemispherical “Megarian” bowls, produced from the 3rd to the 1st century BC, were an imported luxury ware common on the tables of the Ptolemaic/Hellenistic elite in Egypt. The collection of 16 vessels of this kind from the Polish excavations at Tell Atrib/Athribis, discovered between 1969 and 1999, is for the most part well stratified, dated contextually by coins and amphora stamp handles to two broader horizons: second half of the 3rd and first half of the 2nd century BC, and the turn of the 2nd century BC. Three variants were distinguished by the author, differentiated by details of the relief decoration. The group of vessels catalogued in this article originated probably from Ionian workshops in Asia Minor.
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Myśliwiec, Karol. "L’acquis des fouilles de Tell Atrib pour la connaissance de l’époque ptolémaïque." In Classica Orientalia. Essays presented to Wiktor Andrzej Daszewski on his 75th Birthday, 387–98. DiG Publisher, 2011. http://dx.doi.org/10.37343/pcma.uw.dig.9788371817212.pp.387-398.
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The article gives a brief overview of the archaeological evidence for the Ptolemaic phase in the existence of ancient Athribis, a site located in modern Benha in the Nile delta in Egypt. Excavation of the part of the site around Kom Sidi Youssouf revealed a sequence of layers dated as follows: the earliest from the beginning of the Ptolemaic period through the reign of Ptolemy V (a); essentially the reign of Ptolemy VI through the second half of the 2nd century BC (b); and the later Ptolemaic period through the beginning of the Roman period, the latter phase largely disturbed by later activities at the site. The investigated quarter was not settled before the second half of the 4th century BC and later developed into a vibrant workshop quarter producing pottery and terracottas, stone figurines, faience vessels, gold jewelry and sundry other objects. Many of the artifacts, a selection of which is presented in the paper, were most certainly produced as devotional objects for sale and use in the numerous shrines and temples that appear to have existed in this part of the ancient city. The assemblage is characterized by a high quality of execution and iconographic originality, showing that the artists—assumedly Egyptian, Greek and Oriental—reached for the best Hellenistic models for their craftwork.
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Geissen, Angelo. "The Nome Coins of Roman Egypt." In Coinage and Identity in the Roman Provinces. Oxford University Press, 2005. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780199265268.003.0020.
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When octavian-augustus gained control of Egypt in 30 bc he inherited the administration which had been installed by his Ptolemaic predecessors, but added the Praefectus Aegypti, a Roman Eques, as the new head of the government of Roman Egypt. Augustus retained the Egyptian closed currency system, and struck only bronze denominations (those early in the reign were a continuation of those from towards the end of the reign of Cleopatra VII). Regnal years appeared from year 28 (L KH = 3/2 BC) to year 42 (L MB = AD 12/13). After a gap of about fifty years new debased silver (billon) tetradrachms were issued by Tiberius in his seventh year (L Z = AD 20/1). The tetradrachm, normally called state´r in papyri, survived as a denomination, with a decrease in its weight and silver content, until the reform of Diocletian in Egypt in AD 296/7, when the new Latin nummus replaced the old ‘Greek’ system. The bronze coinage reached its peak in the first half of the second century when it consisted of a range of denominations of the drachma and its fractions, and when the output especially of bronze drachmas became very extensive; some last examples of bronze coins appear under Gallienus and Claudius II. The typology of this coinage includes a great variety of individual reverse designs. We find Greek, Roman, and Egyptian topics. As may be expected, Egyptian religious and cultural life is represented in a wide range of images; Roman ideas and types, like images of members of the imperial family, personifications, events in Rome and elsewhere in the empire, are copied or reflected by the Alexandrian mint; finally, Greek types occur in the form of representations of deities of the traditional Graeco-Roman pantheon, or as pictorial scenes from mythology. There are some remarkable series of bronze coins preserved; among them are the so-called nome coins (or coins of the nomes of Roman Egypt). Since pharaonic times Egypt had been divided into forty-two administrative districts, which the Greeks later called nomoí (singular nomós). Classical authors give different numbers of nomes and so do the coins in question.
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Thonemann, Peter. "2. From Alexander to Augustus." In The Hellenistic Age: A Very Short Introduction, 15–39. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/actrade/9780198746041.003.0002.
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‘From Alexander to Augustus’ describes the twists and turns of Hellenistic history, from Alexander’s accession (336 bc) to Cleopatra’s death and the end of the Ptolemaic kingdom (30 bc). It begins by outlining Alexander’s reign and the first generation after his death (323–281 bc), when his empire fractured into three successor kingdoms, each ruled by a Macedonian king: the Antigonids in Macedon, the Ptolemies in Egypt, and the Seleucids in western and central Asia. The rising power of the imperial city-states of Carthage and Rome is described, including Rome’s victories over Philip V and Antiochus III during the 2nd century bc. It ends with the final period of the Hellenistic age (133–30 bc).
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Thomas, Joshua J. "The Nile Mosaic at Praeneste." In Art, Science, and the Natural World in the Ancient Mediterranean, 300 BC to AD 100, 41–88. Oxford University Press, 2021. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780192844897.003.0002.
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This chapter examines the Nile Mosaic at Praeneste, the pièce de résistance at the heart of this study. While the mosaic was laid in Italy during the later second century BC, it is suggested here that it was inspired by an earlier work of art from Ptolemaic Alexandria. Having established this Ptolemaic context, the discussion then turns to the representations of animals accompanied by Greek identifying labels depicted in the upper part of the composition. New suggestions are advanced concerning where and when these animal representations were first formulated, and how they contributed to the message of the composition as a whole. The chapter finishes with a consideration of the semi-precious gemstones depicted in the mosaic. Like the labelled animals, these gems helped to deliver a bold message concerning Ptolemaic authority in north-east Africa.
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Kushnir-Stein, Alla. "City Eras on Palestinian Coinage." In Coinage and Identity in the Roman Provinces. Oxford University Press, 2005. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780199265268.003.0018.
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Thirty-Eight Palestinian Cities Minted coins at various times during the Hellenistic and Roman periods. The vast majority of these coins bear dates, with the bulk of the dates involving individual city eras. During the third century BC, royal Ptolemaic silver was struck in several urban centres on the Palestinian coast. The coinage from Ptolemais, Joppe, and Gaza was fairly substantial and most of it was dated by the regnal years of the kings. One undated silver coin has also been attributed to Dora. On these Ptolemaic issues the cities are represented only by monograms. Palestine came under Seleucid control c.200 BC, after its final conquest by Antiochus III. From the reign of Antiochus IV (175–164) onwards, there are both royal and city coinages, the latter mostly of bronze. The dates which appear on many of these coins use the Seleucid era of 312 BC. As in the preceding century, only coastal cities were involved: Ptolemais, Ascalon, Gaza, and Demetrias. The location of the last city is not known for certain, but an identification with Strato’s Tower, later rebuilt by Herod as Caesarea, seems possible. There is more information about the cities themselves on these second-century coins. Royal issues often bear the names of cities as well as specific symbols, like the dove in Ascalon or the Phoenician mem in Gaza. City-coinage proper further mentions Seleucid dynastic names, like that of Seleucia for Gaza or Antioch for Ptolemais; we would not have known about these dynastic names if not for their appearance on these coins. In the last quarter of the second century, new titles, ‘sacred and inviolable’, appear on coins of Ptolemais, Ascalon, and Gaza. The first individual city eras were established in this region at the very end of the second century BC, with the earliest material evidence belonging to the beginning of the first century: Ascalon, coin of year 6 (99/98 BC); Gaza, coins of years 13 and 14 (96/95, 95/94 or slightly later); Ptolemais, coin of year 9 (apparently from the first decade of the first century BC). In Ascalon and Ptolemais the new era appears together with the addition of the title ‘autonomous’.