Abstract: This talk explores the myths, founders, and local traditions depicted on city coins of the Roman Near East, and how this imagery reflected ideas about the community and its past. The practice of putting images of founders and local myths on coinage is a well-known phenomenon among cities of the Roman world, and helped forge and maintain cultural, ethnic, kinship and historical links between and within communities. Investigating the rich corpus of material related to this practice in the cities of Judaea, Syria, and Arabia, we will see how Joppa located the myth of Andromeda in southern Judaea, consider Capitolias’ promotion of Alexander the Great as founder, and discuss the use of Italic foundation imagery in Roman colonies. We will survey the role of Io, Heracles, and Minos at Gaza, and Dionysus and the nymph Nysa at Scythopolis, and explore the evidence for imagery drawn from Jewish traditions.
