DOGS ON ANCIENT COINS

DOGS AND PEOPLE HAVE BEEN COMPANIONS for at least 15 thousand years. Some DNA evidence suggests that this date might be pushed back as much as 40 thousand years ago. Dogs and wolves are closely related, and in the earliest images created by Stone Age artists, it is not always clear whether we are seeing a dog or a wolf. In ancient Egyptian art, we occasionally see working dogs used in hunting and war. Images of the dog, both realistic and fanciful, begin to appear on coins soon after dawn of coinage in the sixth century BCE.

Possibly the earliest appearance of any canine on a coin is the winged dog on a stater of Cyzicus dated to c. 550 – 450 BCE[3]. Flying dogs seem to have gone extinct in antiquity, much to the relief of the birds.

Another fanciful image on a Cyzicene stater (c. 500-450 BCE) is Cerberus (or Kerberos) the mythical three-headed hound that guarded the entrance to the underworld. On the coin, only two heads are visible. A perfectly ordinary dog (although beautifully rendered) appears along with the emblematic tuna on another stater of roughly the same date.

One of the last examples of a dog on a Roman imperial coin is a rare gold aureus of Emperor Probus dated to 278 CE. The spectacular reverse shows the final labor of Hercules, who was required to enter the underworld to capture and bring back the three-headed dog Cerberus. This is one of the few coin images of Cerberus to clearly show all three heads, ferociously snapping at the hero.

To read the complete article, see:
Dogs on Ancient Coins (www.coinweek.com/ancient-coins/dogs-on-ancient-coins/)

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