PERSIA, Achaemenid Empire. Time of Artaxerxes III to Darios III, circa 350-333 BC. Tetradrachm (Silver, 24 mm, 14.99 g), Chian standard. Uncertain mint in western Asia Minor (Ionia or Sardes?). Persian king or hero in kneeling/running stance to right, holding spear in his right hand and bow in his left. Rev. Incuse rectangle, containing distinct pattern perhaps depicting a relief map of the hinterland of Ephesos. Johnston, Earliest 6. Meadows, Administration 328. Mildenberg, Münzwesen pp. 25–6 and pl. XII, 110. A nicely toned and attractive example of this very unusual issue. Very fine.

Ever since Johnston argued for an interpretation of the remarkable design on the reverse of this issue as a relief map of the hinterland of Ephesos, scholars have debated if this fascinating hypothesis could actually be true. The design certainly bears a striking resemblance to the mountain ridges Madranbaba Dagi, Karincali Dagi and Akaba Tepesi, with the river valleys of the Caÿster and the Maeander as seen from above. However, the concept of showing a landscape from a bird's eye view, though it seems so intuitive to us in the age of Google Maps, is quite modern and was very likely never developed in antiquity. The evidence we have indicates that geographers of antiquity mapped their world not from a bird's eye view of the earth's surface but as a sequence of journeys between fixed locations. This is perhaps best illustrated in the monumental Tabula Peutingeriana, a road map of the Roman Empire dating to the 4th or 5th century AD. While the map shows the Mediterranean world heavily distorted (measuring 680 cm east to west but only 34 cm north to south), it was not designed to show an accurate rendering of the earth's surface. Instead, it was meant to provide the relative locations of cities and the distances between them to travelers and administrators. With these caveats in mind, the fascinating interpretation of the reverse on the present coin as a highly sophisticated three-dimensional relief map of the hinterland of Ephesos, tempting as it may seem, is unlikely to be accurate. What the particular design is supposed to show thus remains an unsolved mystery