Dating of standardized classical Owls

Long post...

I posted something similar to what follows elsewhere. It generated
only one response, a good response (on-target, substantive,
knowledgeable, and flame-free g) but it was from someone who hadn't
read the book, so on the off-chance that anyone here collects ancient
coins g and the genuinely remote possibility that anyone here has
read this book, I thought I'd try here too.

The most commonly recognized ancient coins by the general population
are Athenian Owl tetradrachms, typically just called "Owls," both in
ancient times and today, because of their popularity. For a few years
now I've been threatening to write a book if no one else did on
standardized classical Athenian Owls, which are commonly dated now c.
449-413 BC, after David Sear in his 1978 book Greek Coins and Their
Values (Sear in turn followed Chester Starr in his 1970 book Athenian
Coinage, 480-449 B.C.). Some dealers use other dating schemes, with
these schemes differing widely.

Just as with a similar thought of mine to do a book on Alexander the
Great's coinage, somebody far more knowledgeable than me has come
along and done it before I did. With Alexanders, it was Georges Le
Rider with his book Alexander the Great: Coinage, Finances, and
Policy, written in French and published in 2003 and translated (and
updated) by W.E. Higgins and published in 2007 by the American
Philosophical Society (kudos to them!). Great book, very scholarly,
perhaps too heavy here for some collectors but wonderful if you like
to delve deep. More later.

With Owls, it's Christophe Flament's Le monnayage en argent d'Athènes,
written in French and published in 2007. No translation in English.
Anybody know if any is in the works? I doubt it, but one can hope. For
my own purposes I'll be scanning, OCRing, and translating parts of the
copy of the book I bought with the help of two heavy-duty translation
programs I have from Systran and LEC, designed for long documents, to
try to make more sense of it. In the meantime, I've made some sense of
it with the smattering of French I know and because fortunately we use
a universal numbering system (1-9) just as we should use a universal
language with a book like this targeted to a worldwide readership. g

I've talked to just one person thus far who has read this book, but he
said he didn't find it useful. Anybody else read it? From my perusing
of it, it seems useful. The book purportedly is about the entire run
of Owls, from c. 550 BC to c. 40 BC, but its coverage of archaic, pre-
standardized classical, intermediate style, and new style Owls is
cursory. It delves deep, however, with the standardized classical
Owls.

Flament placed into three classes the standardized Owls (this is not
the best of terms; sometimes "mass Owls" is used, which is probably a
better term). He dates his Group I 460-440 BC, Group II 440-420 BC,
and Group III 420-405 BC. As far as I can tell (thus far), he bases
this on purely stylistic analysis, not on die analysis. This is
similar to what I've done with a similar scheme I've devised, though
my dating is different from Flament's, and I call my groups Type A,
Type B, and Type C, explained on my opening page on Owls:

http://rg.ancients.info/owls

Some dealers use their own stylistic conclusions to divide
standardized Owls into smaller groups dated differently, including
Harlan J. Berk, but most just date them as a single group.

Much of Flament's book is a description of Owl hoards, which will
likely be less useful to most collectors. Most useful will likely be
his tables illustrating Owl specimens and dividing them into his three
classes, which can be used to attribute coins. His system doesn't
appear to be foolproof or ironclad, with some of his specimens
appearing to have about as equal a claim to fit into another of his
classes than where he put them. I'm not yet able to get to anywhere
close to all of his thoughts, but I suspect he has offered a similar
caveat as the one I did, which was "With the huge numbers of
standardized Classical Owls minted, with the many different dies used,
and with the many different die engravers likely used, there are no
doubt plenty of exceptions to the above generalities."

It would be interesting to hear others' thoughts about Flament's work,
if anybody here has read it.

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