Decapolis Coinage

Decapolis coinage is the civic coinage of the Decapolis, a group of Greek-style cities east of the Jordan river (with Scythopolis to its west) in what is now northern Jordan, southern Syria and northern Israel. The cities, which included Gadara, Gerasa, Philadelphia, Pella, Hippos and Scythopolis, struck mainly bronze coins from the first century BCE until the middle of the third century CE.

The coins carried Greek legends, local gods and, under Roman rule, the emperor's portrait. Many were dated by an era starting in 64/63 BCE, when Pompey brought the region under Roman control, which makes them a useful record of how these cities saw their own history.

The Roman writer Pliny the Elder lists ten cities, though he notes that the membership varied. Most had Hellenistic origins under the Ptolemies or Seleucids and had come under Hasmonean Jewish rule in the late second and early first centuries BCE. When Pompey reorganised the East in 64–63 BCE, he restored their self-government, and several cities dated their coins from that year, a reckoning known as the Pompeian era.

Gadara, famous as a centre of Greek learning, was among the earliest and most active mints. It is the city most often cited for Decapolis coinage, but Gerasa (Jerash), Philadelphia (Amman), Scythopolis, Pella, Hippos, Dium, Canatha and later Capitolias and Abila all produced coins at various times.

Decapolis coins were almost all bronze, used as small change in local markets. Silver for larger payments came from elsewhere, especially Tyrian shekels, provincial tetradrachms and Roman denarii. Bronze sizes roughly corresponded to Roman fractions such as the as, though local denominations are not always clear. Output was irregular: a city might strike coins for a particular emperor, a festival or a building project and then stop for years, so the surviving coins come in distinct bursts rather than a continuous series.

Each city used its own patron gods and symbols. Gadara often showed Herakles or the city goddess Tyche; Gerasa honoured Artemis; Philadelphia used Herakles and other deities; Scythopolis linked itself with Dionysus; and Hippos, whose name means "horse" in Greek, showed a horse. The city goddess with a turreted crown was common across the group. Under the empire the obverse usually carried the emperor, with the city's name, its titles and the year on the reverse.

Civic bronze was a mark of status for these cities, expressing their Greek identity in a region that also used the coins of Judaea and the Nabataean kingdom. Supplies of small change made daily money use possible in markets that also lay on wider trade routes towards Damascus and the coast.

Most mints fell silent around the middle of the third century CE. Rising costs, the spread of debased imperial coins and the general currency debasement of the period made local bronze less useful, and civic coinage ceased across most of the Roman East. Later, these lands used imperial coins and, after the seventh-century Arab conquest, the transitional Arab-Byzantine coinage.

Decapolis coins preserve images of temples, cults and civic titles that are often unrecorded elsewhere, and their era dates help archaeologists date building work. They sit alongside the Phoenician issues of Sidon and Byblos as evidence of how Greek cities of the Levant used coinage to assert identity under Rome.

• American Numismatic Society