Record Sale: USD 6mln for Panticapaeum Stater

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billd89
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Record Sale: USD 6mln for Panticapaeum Stater

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Crimean coin. Taken from Hermitage, sold by (under the orders of) Stalin.
https://www.theartnewspaper.com/2023/05 ... eaking-48m

Gee, I wonder what nationality the oligarch buyer is ...

Z-bag.

The significance of Panticapaeum (=Kerch) should not be lost on anyone reading the news in the last decade or so.

Random reactions: Note the body-double? Offering to The Beast? The Thieving Soviet, always. "Gifts" to the embodiment of Evil, Mammon.

This story is interesting merely for the fact it is a new, record-setting ancient coin price. What is $6mln, anyway. Was the previous record a fake?

Godfrey Locker Lampson, the early 20th century British politician and noted collector of ancient Greek coins who owned a coin struck from the same die, once wrote of its design: “The head of the satyr is a marvel of speaking portraiture. That so much expression could be packed into so small a round would not be believed by anyone who had not seen it.”

That facial expression. A satyr was (symbolically) a desperate, aged homosexual who lurked in the forests at boundaries where he could flee persecution. Haunted. This one looks crazy; compare:

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Would that portrait be mocking a previous ruler? Presumably, Satyrus I c.385 BC. Astute readers will note that I almost never fail to point out a Conan/Schwarzenegger link, particularly where current events neatly intersect the horrifying past or something Scythian-flavored.

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