CAPPADOCHIA CAESAREA Severus Alexander 222-235 AD bronze, year 6

Description

In Achaemenid times the city was called Mazaca. The satrap (governor) remained in place during the Alexander period, then became kings. The kings became Hellenizers and renamed the city Eusebia. Then the Romans came and called it Caesarea.

Cappadochia (Cappadocia) is a region of central Anatolia. People carved out cave homes in the hills, the original “troglodytes.” The big modern city is Kayseri. It was usually subject to some empire or another. There was a Hellenistic kingdom, then Roman control, then the Arabs, then the Turks.

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.