Sylloge Nummorum Graecorum Turkey 9. The Özkan Arıkantürk Collection, Volume 1: Troas

O. TEKİN & A. EROL-ÖZDİZBAY, Sylloge Nummorum Graecorum Turkey 9. The Özkan Arıkantürk Collection, Volume 1: Troas. İstanbul 2015. Turkish Institute of Archaeology, 91 pages (with 827 coins in 48 plates). ISBN: 9786054701582

Sylloge Nummorum Graecorum (SNG) is the name of an international research project founded by the British Academy in 1930, and of an ongoing series of volumes, the first of which was pub­lished in Great Britain in 1931, of the collection of Greek coins assembled by Capt. E. G. Spen­cer-Church­ill. The main purpose of this project is to collect the known examples of ancient Greek coins into a published corpus, the coins published with illustrations and catalogue infor­ma­tion facing each other. Thereby all the public and private collections of Greek coins could be represented, made accessible to scholars, studied through this publication, today consisting of more than 120 vol­umes. This project has been realized in different countries, including: Den­mark, France, Ger­many, Great Britain, Greece, Israel, Sweden, Switzerland and the United Sta­tes, as well as Turkey, where the implementation of the SNG project began in 2002.

Here we notice the 9^th issue of SNG Turkey, containing the coins from the Özkan Arıkantürk nu­mismatic collection that were minted in the Troas (or Troad, the region centered around site of the ancient Greek city of this name located in north-western Turkey, today, Çanakkale). It is the first volume of SNG from this collection and was published by the Turkish Institute of Archaeology in İstanbul in 2015. The editors of this volume are Oğuz Tekin and Aliye Erol-Özdiz­bay.

The SNG Turkey 9 volume contains within its 91 pages: contents, foreword, preface, abbre­viations, plates, indexes, list of concordance. Özkan Arıkantürk provided brief information about his collection and himself in the foreword. He notes that his activity as a collector begun in 1994, collecting Greek and Roman glass, metal and terracotta objects. Some years later he be­came interested in numismatics and today 2277 coins in his collection are under the supervision of the Izmir Archaeological Museum. The coins in the Özkan Arıkantürk collection will form in to­tal three SEG Turkey volumes. The second and third parts of the collection will be consist of the coins of Mysia and Aeolis (likewise in the northwestern part of Anatolia).

827 coins from 26 cities of the Troad are catalogued in this first volume. All of these coins were bought by the collector between 1996 and 2013 at Burhaniye, ancient Adramyttium. The ed­itors of the collection, Oğuz Tekin and Aliye Erol-Özdizbay expressed their gratitude to the collector for his help in the preface and they record rare examples from the cities of Achilleium, Ophryneum, Pionia, Scamandria, Thymbra and Zeleia are included in this publication.

The abbreviation section is divided into two parts. Under the title bibliographical, the list of sources employed is given. Some abbreviations in this part concern catalogues of numismatic auctions, with the explanations of the abbreviations given in the technical part.

The coins have been classified as to the area where they were minted in the plates section. 827 coins are classified from 26 ancient cities. The coins included in the collection divide into two groups: Hellenistic and Roman period coins. Coins dating from the Hellenistic period were struck at: Abydus, Achilleion, Alexandria Troas, Antandrus, Assus, Aioleion, Birytis, Cebren, Colone, Dar­danus, Gargara, Gergis, Hamaxitus, Ilium, Lamponeia, Larissa, Neandria, Ophrynium, Scamandria, Scepsis, Sigeum, Thymbra, Zeleia, Islands of Troas, Tenedos. Roman period coins were minted in Abydus, Alexandria Troas, Antandrus, Assus, Ilium, the Pionia regions of Troas. The depictions on the coins struck in the Hellenistic and Roman periods are quite different. We find the bust or the head of different goddesses or various mythological creatures’ images on the obverse of the Hellenistic coins; but the main depiction on the Roman coins are images of the different emper­ors. These coins were struck in silver and bronze.

The coins numbered 825 to 827 were minted by the two commanders Memnon and Mentor in Troas. These are Rhodian type coins. Previously these had been considered coins minted by Carian commanders. It was realized that three coins (Nos. 339, 340, 341) presenting under the ti­tle of Aioleion, actually belonged to Kolnon Aeoleis and were minted at Assus. Information con­cerning geographical places and types, the names of those responsible for minting are given in the Index. The sources employed in the preparation of this catalogue are given in the list of concordance. The inventory numbers are combined with the catalogue numbers of the coins in the collection.