Author Description

"This volume presents a die study of the provincial silver coinage of Judah, undertaken and completed by Jean-Philippe Fontanille, with commentary by Haim Gitler and Catharine Lorber. Our primary goal is to share the intimate knowledge we gained of this coinage: correct descriptions of the coins and their designs and inscriptions; the number of obverse and reverse dies identified for each issue; and the probable sequence of the issues (here termed "types") as deduced from iconographic associations and die links. The die study was published in preliminary visual form on the website Menorah Coin Project, created by Fontanille, and now maintained by the Israel Numismatic Society.1 The Menorah Coin Project presents the underlying data of the die study, i.e., the coins examined by Fontanille, including a few that could be classified by type, but whose dies could not be identified.2 All the dies are illustrated in the connection tables at the back of this volume, sometimes using composite images created by Fontanille, and the examples of each die combination are listed on the connection tables. These connection tables illustrate an updated version of the Menorah Coin Project die-link study. The most recent and reliable figures for each Yehud coin type are those presented in Chapter VIII, which include specimens added to the corpus in the final stages of our work...." -- Preface.