Half shekel with portrait of Hannibal (?)/Melqart [obverse] and elephant [reverse], c.213-210 B.C., Silver
3.46g, 19mm
Burnett Enna Hoard 123; SNG Copenhagen 383
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Unknown Half shekel with portrait of Hannibal (?)/Melqart [obverse] and elephant [reverse], c.213-210 B.C., Silver 3.46g, 19mm Burnett Enna Hoard 123; SNG Copenhagen 383 The figure of Hannibal (possibly pictured on the obverse [front] of the coin above) couldn't be a more fitting halfway point to A History of the Classical World in 100 Objects. The Second Punic War between Rome and Carthage (218–201 BCE) is one of the most famous of all ancient military confrontations, including as it did Hannibal's legendary crossing of the Alps with his army and war elephants. On the coin above, probably minted between 213-210 BCE during Hannibal's expedition against Sicily in the wake of his triumphant defeat of the Romans at Cannae (216 BCE), we can see one of those famous elephants depicted in glorious detail. The obverse of the coin shows a portrait head in profile, wearing a laurel wreath with ribbons floating above the nape of the neck. The upwards-tilted eyes, tousled hair and diadem-like wreath clearly look back to coin portraits of Alexander the Great (like the one we saw earlier in the series): Hannibal, commander of the Carthaginian forces in the attempt to overthrow Rome, is quite clearly allying himself symbolically with the great conqueror, asserting his identity in the struggle for imperial control over the Mediterranean. Opinions differ over whether this portrait actually depicts Hannibal himself, or the Carthaginian god Melqart – most likely it is a fusion of the two, a deliberate blurring of boundaries between god and mortal, as Alexander himself had done before.
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Today's artefacts are some of the most exciting we've seen so far – although I know at first glance they might not look it. To a modern eye these strange bronze objects don't make much sense: but to an ancient, they would have been a recognisable element of one of the most important military assets – battleships.
These are, in fact, ancient bronze rams—discovered in 2008 (and another in 2010) on the seabed off the coast of Sicily—which would have been fitted to the front of a ship (see reconstruction below) and used to ram into the sides of enemy ships. What makes them particularly fascinating is that archaeologists have been able to date them precisely, using both state-of-the-art carbon dating and detailed accounts by the historian Polybius, to a specific battle: the naval battle of March 10 of 241 BCE between the Romans and Carthaginians, during the First Punic War. The First Punic War was an explosive conflict between the nascent power of Rome and Carthage, an ancient civilisation based in modern Tunisia and a significant presence in the Mediterranean, over the island of Sicily. ("Punic" comes from the Latin name for the Carthaginians, Punici.) It marked the first of three major conflicts between the two powers which would define the third century BCE and proved to be a major turning point in the development of Rome's naval and military strength, and the beginnings of the spread of Roman control throughout the Mediterranean. What's fascinating about the rams discovered is that we have examples of both Roman and Carthaginian rams – giving us a rare picture of both sides of the war. The left-hand ram above (Egadi 1) bears a Latin inscription, whereas the right (Egadi 3) has an inscription in Punic, the language of the Carthaginians. The problem is that we have very little evidence for pre-Roman Carthage – in spite of how powerful it was as a presence in the Mediterranean before the Punic Wars – because, after its conquest by the Romans at the end of the Third Punic War (146 BCE), the city was completely destroyed, razed to the ground and (so the story goes) sown over with salt to prevent its ever being settled again. However much truth there may be to this myth, this pair of rams provides evocative evidence of the reality of the Punic Wars – on both sides of the conflict. Unknown Sarcophagus of Lucius Cornelius Scipio Barbatus, early to mid 3rd cent. B.C., Tuff The Vatican Museums, Rome As we move into the 3rd century BCE we turn briefly from Greece to Italy, where Rome was engaged in the third of a series of Samnite Wars (we saw the First Samnite War possibly depicted in no. 37 of this series). This sarcophagus, or coffin, belonged – as the inscription tells us – to Lucius Cornelius Scipio Barbatus, who held the shared post of head of the Roman state ("consul") in 298 BCE. During the third of the Samnite Wars, fought between Rome and neighbouring populations in Italy, Scipio Barbatus led the Roman troops to victory against the Etruscans (whose funerary urns and sarcophagi we saw earlier in the series) at Volterra. Scipio Barbatus stands at the beginning of what would be a century of Roman conquest across the Mediterranean, building the foundations of the vast Roman empire.
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AuthorEmily Hauser is a classicist and researcher at Harvard and author of historical fiction recovering the lost women of the ancient world, including FOR THE MOST BEAUTIFUL and FOR THE WINNER. Archives
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