SAMARIA. Series with place names and related types. Circa 375-332 BCE. Half Mʿh = Hemiobol (Silver, 7 mm, 0.29 g, 3 h). Youthful male head to left. Rev. Goat standing on its hind legs, eating from a palm tree; to right, 𐡃 or 𐡓 (D or R in Aramaic); to left, ΘE; all within shallow circular incuse. CSC 43. Gitler, Iconography, p. 69, Fig. 2. Hendin -. Jeselsohn 193-194. Meshorer & Qedar 111. NH -. Shoshana -. Sofaer 129. Wyssmann p. 285, MQ 111. Very rare and arguably the finest known example. Boldly struck in high relief and with an excellent reverse. Light deposits, otherwise, extremely fine.



The reverse of this beautiful coin combines an Aramaic inscription with the Greek letters ΘE, surviving as a remnant of the Athenian ethnic. The image of a goat feeding from a palm tree strikingly recalls the famous 'Ram in a Thicket' sculptures in the British Museum, which, despite their misleading conventional name, likewise depict goats. Dating to circa 2600–2400 BC, these Sumerian works predate the present coin by more than two millennia and thus attest to the deep antiquity of the motif.