SAMARIA. Series with personal names and miscellaneous letters. Delayah (?), governor of Samaria, circa 407-380/70 BCE. Rbʾ Šql = Drachm (Silver, 14 mm, 4.05 g, 4 h). Bridled horse standing left, forelock tied up with a ribbon into an upright tuft; in upper right field, 𐡃 or 𐡓 (D or R in Aramaic); all within square guilloche-pattern border. Rev. Bearded, royal-headed winged sphinx seated to left; in upper right field, 𐡃 or 𐡓 (D or R in Aramaic); all within square guilloche-pattern border within incuse square. CSC 87. Hendin 6035 (same dies). Jeselsohn 40 (same dies). Meshorer & Qedar 28 = Sofaer 116 (same dies). NH -. Shoshana -. Wyssmann p. 253, MQ 28. Extremely rare and in exceptional condition for the issue. Beautifully toned and with fully struck inscriptions. Extremely fine.



For a fuller discussion of the possible attribution of this series to Delayah, see the commentary to lot 125 above. On the present piece, the two letters on both obverse and reverse are exceptionally clear; their broad form favours a reading as 𐡃 rather than 𐡓, and thus supports the attribution to Delayah. The appeal of the type, however, is not only historical but also iconographic. Like many Philistian and Samarian issues, it draws freely on Achaemenid visual language. The horse appears to wear a stylized tied forelock (cf. lot 36 above), a feature well known from Persian representations of horses. The reverse shows a sphinx with a bearded, crowned, royal-type head, evoking the Persian Great King. Very close parallels, though with the heads turned backwards, are preserved on the famous glazed-brick panels with opposed sphinxes from the palace of Dareios I at Susa, now in the Louvre (Louvre Sb 3325). The coins thus condense the political and artistic world of Achaemenid Samaria: local authority expressed through the language of imperial imagery.