SELEUKID Antiochos I 280-261 BC tetradrachm

Description

Antiochos (Antiochus) I was the son of Seleukos I and a Sogdian (Iranic) princess. As was normal at the time, he was pretty much always at war. He paid attention to culture and finance too, We know that from the artistry and availability of his coins. His epithet, Soter, means “savior,” and possibly refers to his miraculous victory over the Gauls with the use of war elephants.

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.