CILICIA. Nephelis (?). Circa 334-early 3rd century BC. Obol (Silver, 11 mm, 0.60 g, 3 h). Head of Herakles to right, wearing lion skin headdress. Rev. Monogram of NE between bow to left and arrowhead to right. Imhoof-Blumer, Monnaies grecques, p. 467. 47 = Svoronos 1888, p. 60, 3 and pl. IV, 10 = Svoronos 1905, p. 165, 5a and pl. V, 17 = Yarkin p. 2, 1. Tatar Series 1. Extremely rare, apparently the seventh known example of this enigmatic issue, and by far the finest. Light traces of cleaning and with minor edge chipping, otherwise, good extremely fine.



Since Pellerin first published the type in 1763, coins bearing the enigmatic EN or ENA monogram have remained among the most hotly debated issues of Asia Minor (Pellerin, Recueil de médailles de peuples et de villes (1763), p. 128, pl. CXVI, 8). In 1883, Imhoof-Blumer read the monogram as EN and suggested that the series had been struck by an as yet unidentified coastal city in Caria, Pamphylia, or Pisidia (Imhoof-Blumer, Monnaies grecques (1883), p. 467, 47–53). Svoronos revised his interpretation several times, attributing the coins first to Erannos on Crete, then to Erythrai in Ionia, and finally to Enaia/Anaia in Caria (Svoronos 1888, pp. 59–64; 1903, p. 182, no. 27; 1905, pp. 161–174). In 1995, U. Yarkın placed the mint in eastern Pamphylia or western Cilicia (U. Yarkın, Enaia/Anaia Sikkeleri, in: Moneta 4 (1995), pp. 1–2), while in 2008 T. Gökyıldırım associated the series with Alexander’s officer Nearchos and proposed Side as the mint for the Herakles coins and Phaselis for the prow series (T. Gökyıldırım, Etenna Definesi (1991), in: İ. Delemen et al. (eds.), Prof. Dr. Haluk Abbasoğlu’na 65. Yaş Armağanı, vol. 1, 2008, pp. 505–517). A Künker cataloguer later suggested an attribution to the Enetoi of Paphlagonia (Künker, Auction 333, 16–17 March 2020, lot 52).

A major advance in the attribution came with Ömer Tatar’s comprehensive reassessment of the group, in which he identified Nephelis on the western Cilician coast as the most convincing candidate (Tatar, The Re-Attribution of Some Uncertain Asia Minor Coins to Nephelis in Cilicia, in: AIIN 66, 2020, pp. 71–97, esp. pp. 77–85). Central to his argument is the marked concentration of finds in the Alanya region, including the first example recovered in a controlled archaeological excavation at Alanya Castle, while no specimens are known from excavations at Side or Phaselis (Tatar 2020, pp. 77–79). Since civic bronze coins generally circulated only within a limited radius of their mint, this distribution strongly points to western Cilicia. The monogram can also plausibly be read in retrograde as NE, providing a further link with Nephelis (Tatar 2020, p. 79). Located approximately 60 km east of Alanya, Nephelis was already inhabited in the Hellenistic period and had the status of a polis (Karamut/Russell 1999, pp. 355–371; Tatar 2020, pp. 82–83).

On stylistic and metrological grounds, the Herakles series may be dated to the final quarter of the 4th or the 3rd century BC. The known silver coins weigh between 0.57 and 0.68 g and are best understood as obols struck on the Attic standard, while the head of Herakles on the present specimen clearly follows the coinage of Alexander the Great and his successors. Tatar recorded only six silver obols of the series, in contrast to a substantially larger bronze coinage. The present coin, the finest known specimen to our knowledge, therefore represents the exceptionally rare and prestigious silver denomination of this remarkable series; for its attribution, we follow Tatar in assigning it to Nephelis.