Iconografia e leggenda. Il linguaggio monetale di Cartagine

This paper is about how the cultural, political and economic monetary language adopted by Carthage was influenced and arose from the necessity for the Phoenicians to adapt to the Greek and Roman worlds maintaining at the same time typical oriental characteristics. The first Punic coins in the West, which date back to around the 5th century B.C., were minted to facilitate integration into the Greek political and cultural reality in Sicily at that time, where each town produced its coins in almost complete autonomy and where each emission reflected the economic level reached by each single centre. This explains why the Phoenicians chose to use an iconography more or less of Greek inspiration and whose legends, though written in the Phoenician language, expressed a Sicilian semantic and political context. It was only in 410 B.C., due to the necessity to pay the mercenary troops engaged in war on the island, that Carthage began minting the first Silver coins that allude to the Carthaginian Military Administration present on the island. Nonetheless, the iconography remained predominantly similar to the Greek model though not exclusively. For instance, the Siculo-Punic tetradrachm, 320-306 B.C., which bore a female head wearing a oriental tiara and a lion standing in front of a palm tree, is a traditional Oriental Persian theme where the tiara and lion are symbolic of the ruling power of the Satrapes. The fact that coinage was introduced in North Africa and in Carthage itself at a much later date, highlights, on the one hand, the willingness of the Phoenicians to adapt to the economic system prevalent in North Africa where a monetary system was inexistent, and, on the other hand, the fact that in the Phoenician Administrative context money, as a means of exchange, was rare as was the case not only in the Achaemenid Empire but throughout the entire Middle East. The iconography adopted by the various Neopunic centres, from the end of the 3rd century B.C. to the 1st century A.D was of traditional oriental inspiration.