The Dates of the Archaic Owls of Athens belonging to Seltman's Groups H and L

In 1962, in an article entitled The Early Coinages of Athens and Euboea 2, W. P. Wallace argued that the wappenmunzen should be started later than 575 and that the series terminated in 510 with the fall of the Peisistratid tyranny. He further attempted to establish that the oldest owls with unwreathed helmet of Athene were issued in the period 510-490, the wreath being added about 490, « although, since it is an olive wreath, probably not in celebration of Marathon » 3. In a reply to Wallace published in the same year, Kraay used the evidence of hoards Noe 667, Noe 685, and Gela 1957 to demonstrate conclusively that the wreath could not have been added as early as 490. The date given by Kraay in 1956 stood. In the second part of his later article Kraay went on to point out that Wallace's arguments for terminating the wappenmunzen in 510 instead of c525-520 were inconclusive. In the first place, if Wallace is correct, it is strange that Groups H and L leave little or no trace in hoards Noe 667, Noe 685, Gela 1957 and one from South Anatolia, all buried in the decade 490-480. On Wallace's view, Groups H and L would be only ten to twenty years old at this time. Second, Wallace's attempt to use the difference in metallic composition between wappenmunzen and archaic owls in favour of a commencement date for the latter close to 512, when Athenian control of Macedonian mines was lost to the Persians, fails, since all the owls so far analysed belong to later groups of owls than H and L. For

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