A NUMISMATIC AND ARCHAEOMETRIC STUDY ON A GROUP OF TARSOS SILVER COINS

The fight against the illicit traffic of cultural heritage objects has been going on for years. In 1999 a group of coins stolen from Turkey and caught by chance at the Zurich airport was returned to Turkey. In this article we have studied twenty-three silver coins, which were supposedly a hoard minted in Cilicia-Tarsos; coins that were discovered and seized in the Zurich airport. Tarsos is one of the cities which had been granted the honour of minting silver coins, and the city minted silver coins from the reign of the Emperor Augustus to that of the Emperor Macrinus. The examples in this study are four tetradrachm silver coins from the reign of Trajan and nineteen mostly tridrachm silver coins from the reign of Hadrian. Appellations and iconographic properties of minted silver coins from provinces in Anatolia can also be observed on these twenty-three silver coins from Tarsos. The provincial coins of Tarsos studied in this article have been analyzed by using non-destructive energy dispersive X-ray fluorescence spectrometer (ED-XRF); their chemical compositions have been determined and compared with coins of the same age that were minted elsewhere in the Roman Empire. As a result of this comparison, the silver proportion of these Tarsos silver coins has been found to be similar to that of other Roman coinage.