LYDIA, NYSA, Faustina Junior, 147-180 AD, bronze minor

DescriptionThis coin is unusually thick.Nysa ad Meandrum was a town in western central Anatolia not far from Nicaea. In Wikipedia it is referred to as “Carian or Lydian,” a fuzzy border situation. The name refers to grapes, there are many towns named Nysa in the ancient Greek world.Greater Lydia under Croesus, the king renowned for his wealth, was the entire western salient of Anatolia. In later antiquity it was part of the Persian Empire, then was conquered by the Macedonians, who held on until the coming of the Romans.The Romans, as they were building their empire, preferred to let the local coinage arrangements remain in place. As they developed their political system into the Cult of Personality that was the Empire, they started putting imperial portraits on the local coins. Later, as the Empire began to shrink, they preferred to centralize their coinage operations, eliminating local control. There were also allied and client states, some of which, at times, issued coins celebrating the alliance or subservience. The main catalog reference for these coins on this web site is Greek Imperial Coins and their Values, by David Sear.“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.