SELEUKID, Seleukos I, 312-290 BC, silver tetradrachm

DescriptionSeleukos (Seleucus) was one of the successors to Alexander the Great. Through wars and politics he almost succeeded in reuniting the Alexandrian Empire when he was assassinated as he was beginning his attempt to take Macedon itself. His epithet, Nikator, means “victor.”The Seleukid kingdom came into being when Seleukos, a general of Alexander the Great, being in Mesopotamia at the time, just kept it, and went to war with his fellow generals to establish the zones of influence. The Seleukids hung on for a couple of centuries.The big change that Alexander the Great brought about was the union of the Greek spirit of inquiry with the methods of imperial bureaucracy.“Ancient Coins” includes Greek and Roman coins and those of neighbors and successors, geographically from Morocco and Spain all the way to Afghanistan. Date ranges for these begin with the world’s earliest coins of the 8th century BC to, in an extreme case, the end of Byzantine Empire, 1453 AD.