Watch List notes:

Ancients
SICILY. Petra. Ca. 1st century BC / AD. Æ 20mm (5.57 gm, 12h). Head of Heracles right, bearded, wearing lion skin headdress / ΠΕΤΡΕΙΝΩΝ, eagle standing right on thunderbolt. HGC --. BMC Sicily --. Calciati CNS 4 (same dies). Extremely rare, perhaps only the second known specimen! Brown patina. Good Very Fine.Ex Eric P. Newman Numismatic Education Society.Petra as a city is practically unknown to history, except that it was located in northwestern Sicily and from the name ("the Rock") would seem to have been heavily fortified. It may have started out as a Carthaginian colony, but submitted to the Romans after the First Punic War and survived at least into the second century AD. Rare bronze coins of a fairly large denomination, depicting a bearded head usually identified as "Zeus Eleutherios" on the obverse and Aphrodite on the reverse, are attributed to Petra dating from the early-mid 4th century BC, with another issue of somewhat smaller bronze coins (20mm) after the Roman occupation in 241 BC. This issue (SNG Copenhagen 529, Historia Nummorum page 164, Calciati CNS 2-3) has a bearded Heracles on the obverse; for reasons unknown to us it was left out of the recent Handbook of Greek Coins Vol. 2. Our coin, of which only a single previous specimen is recorded (Calciati CNS 4, now shown as in the British Museum Collection, but not noted in the BM catalog), also features Heracles backed with a Macedonian-style eagle on thunderbolt, with the curving legend ΠΕΤΡΕΙΝΩΝ. The legend format and lettering seem to date from the first century BC or later, possibly up to the early second century AD. On the basis of this issue and the post-241 BC examples it would seem Heracles was of particular importance in Petra and the head on earlier bronze coins of the 4th century BC should be revised from Zeus to Heracles (most of these coins survive in poor condition and a close examination reveals the bearded head is wearing a lion skin headdress).

Estimate: 400-550 USD