Unknown Maker, Greek

This coin, with its unique martial imagery, may have been minted to pay a specific army. Like many coins created for military payment, it may have been reformed from the art, armor, or other metals of the very enemy the army defeated. Therefore this object illustrates that coins are shape-shifters as well as world travelers. The malleability of metal lends itself to frequent transformation, so few metal artifacts survive; many metal objects surviving from antiquity originally had another form.