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Description
This paper provides an overview of work to produce a new corpus and die study of Athenian Wappenmünzen. The study is intended to replace the famous but now well out of date 1924 book of Charles Seltman (Athens, Its Coinage and History). We review the changes in coin numbers and die patterns. Among the results are challenges to Seltman’s various claims for various reverse dies linking coins with different obverse types. It can now be demonstrated that most didrachms depicting a horse protome to left are forgeries. Among the most significant discoveries is the fact that the Wappenmünzen mint, in contrast to other major archaic mints on the Greek mainland and in the Aegean, was primarily concerned with the production of obols as well as a good number of drachms and that the didrachm output was relatively small.
