File:Clevelandart 1999.318.a.jpg
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Captions
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Summary
[edit]Coin of Demetrios, I
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Title |
Coin of Demetrios, I |
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Description |
After Alexander of Macedon succeeded in conquering Egypt and Persia in 331 BC, his ambition to rule the known world led him further east across Bactria in Afghanistan, through the Hindu Kush mountain pass, and into India. There he succeeded in defeating all the local kings of the region until his men, on the brink of mutiny, insisted that they return to Greece. Alexander left governors in charge of his territories, and after his death in 323 BC, his governors became independent kings, establishing Hellenistic cities and a Greek cultural base in the region, which lasted for almost 200 years. The inscription on the reverse identifies this coin as an issue of King Demetrios (about 205-170 BC), who ruled the Bactria region in present-day Afghanistan. To commemorate his military victories that expanded his territories to the Kabul Valley and into present-day Pakistan, he depicted himself crowned with the scalp of an elephant, the symbol for India. This motif, along with the image of Hercules on the reverse, visually link him to Alexander of Macedon (356-323 BC), who identified himself with Hercules and depicted himself with the lion scalp after his conquest of the Indus River region in Pakistan in 326 BC. The quality of portraiture on the coins of the Hellenistic kings of Bactria is as naturalistic and refined as the coinage from any part of the Greek world. They followed the same weight standard as the Athenian Greeks, based on the drachma being 4.2 grams of silver. This coin is a tetradrachm, which is four times the weight of a drachma. |
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Date | -200 | |||||||||||||||||||||||
Medium | Silver | |||||||||||||||||||||||
Dimensions | Diameter: 3.3 cm (1 5/16 in.) | |||||||||||||||||||||||
Collection |
institution QS:P195,Q657415 |
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Current location |
Indian and South East Asian Art |
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Accession number |
1999.318.a |
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Place of creation | Afghanistan, Bactria, Bactrian period (3rd-2nd century BC), Demetrios I | |||||||||||||||||||||||
Credit line | John L. Severance Fund | |||||||||||||||||||||||
Source/Photographer | https://clevelandart.org/art/1999.318.a |
Licensing
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This file is made available under the Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication. |
The person who associated a work with this deed has dedicated the work to the public domain by waiving all of their rights to the work worldwide under copyright law, including all related and neighboring rights, to the extent allowed by law. You can copy, modify, distribute and perform the work, even for commercial purposes, all without asking permission.
http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/deed.enCC0Creative Commons Zero, Public Domain Dedicationfalsefalse |
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This file was donated to Wikimedia Commons as part of a project with the Cleveland Museum of Art. See the Open Access at the Cleveland Museum of Art.
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current | 08:15, 22 January 2019 | ![]() | 3,400 × 2,972 (909 KB) | Madreiling (talk | contribs) | pattypan 18.02 |
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