Byblos Coinage

Byblos coinage refers to the coins struck at Byblos, the ancient Phoenician city known to its inhabitants as Gebal, about 40 kilometres north of modern Beirut. Byblos minted silver under the Persian Empire from the fifth or fourth century BCE, coins for Alexander the Great and the Seleucid kings, and civic and Roman provincial bronzes into the early third century CE.

Its output was smaller than that of Tyre or Sidon, but its coins are prized for their imagery, especially the war galleys of the Persian period and the later depictions of the city's great temple.

Byblos began striking silver while Phoenicia was a province of the Achaemenid Persian Empire. The characteristic type shows a war galley on the obverse, often with soldiers' shields along its side and a hippocamp, a mythical sea-horse, beneath it. The reverse commonly shows a lion attacking a bull. Phoenician inscriptions name a series of local kings, which makes these coins an important source for the history of Byblos's rulers.

The coins followed the Phoenician weight standard and were issued as shekels and smaller fractions. Like other early coins of the Levant, they were used in a world where silver was often still weighed, and they circulated alongside cut silver and foreign pieces such as Athenian drachms.

Byblos surrendered to Alexander the Great in 332 BCE. Its last king of the Persian period continued to rule for a time, and the city went on to strike Alexander-type silver on the Attic standard, linking it to the wider Greek monetary system. Phoenicia was later contested between the Ptolemaic and Seleucid kingdoms, and Byblos issued bronze coins in this period, some bearing the name and portrait of the Seleucid king.

Hellenistic and later bronzes of Byblos show a striking local deity: a figure with six wings, identified with the Phoenician god El, whom Greek writers equated with Kronos. Such images show how Greek-style currency was adapted to carry very local religious ideas.

Byblos does not appear to have struck large civic silver issues of the kind produced by Tyre after 126/125 BCE. Its later Hellenistic coinage was mainly bronze, used for local market transactions, while higher-value payments in the city depended on royal silver and, increasingly, on the shekels of its larger neighbours.

Under Roman rule Byblos struck bronze coins with Greek legends calling it "holy Byblos". Coins of the early third century CE, notably under the emperor Macrinus (217–218 CE), show a temple courtyard containing a conical sacred stone, generally identified as the sanctuary of the city's goddess, the Lady of Byblos. These coins are a key piece of evidence for the layout of the temple, which survives only in ruins. Small-value bronzes like these covered local needs, while larger payments were made in Roman denarii and provincial silver.

Byblos was one of four major Phoenician mints of the Persian period, with Tyre, Sidon and Arwad. Its coins help historians trace how money spread through the Levant, from weighed silver measured in units like the biblical shekel to struck coinage. Because the inscriptions on the Persian-period pieces name kings who are otherwise poorly documented, the coins are also one of the few sources for the city's political history in that era. They also record the city's shift from a Phoenician to a Greek weight standard, and the role of coins in trade in timber, papyrus and other goods that made Byblos wealthy.

• British Museum – Collection online