Athenian Owls were arguably the most influential of all coins, and the Classical Owl tetradrachm is the most widely recognized ancient coin among the general public today.

Owls were the first widely used international coin. They popularized the practice of putting a head on the obverse of a coin and a tail (animal) on the reverse. Owls were handled by Pythagoras, Xenophanes, Democritus, Hippocrates, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Euclid, Archimedes, and others whose thinking formed the very foundation of Western civilization. They remained thematically unchanged, Athena on the obverse, her owl on the reverse, for half a millennium, through great changes in the ancient world. President Theodore Roosevelt used a Classical Owl as a pocket piece, which inspired him to order the redesign of U.S. coins early last century.

Athena was goddess of both wisdom and warfare, combining within herself two qualities we find incompatible today but the ancients didn't, a telling difference between their world and ours. She was the patron goddess of Athens, one of the greatest cities of all time.

According to ancient Greek mythology, Athena was the daughter of Zeus and his first wife, Metis, whose name meant "wisdom." Metis warned Zeus that their first son would be powerful than Zeus himself, which agitated Zeus so much that when Metis became pregnant he swallowed whole Metis and their unborn child. This gave him a headache, which he cured by splitting his head open with an axe. (Zeus may have been powerful but he wasn't necessarily smart.) From the wound came forth Athena, fully grown.

One of Athena's precursors was the Eye Goddess of Neolithic peoples. The wide staring eyes of the Eye Goddess were all-seeing and all-knowing. Along with being the goddess of wisdom and warfare, in ancient Greece Athena was also known as an eye goddess. She was described as the "flashing eyed." The large almond-shaped frontal eye on early Owl coins may thus have religious significance. Some disagree, pointing to Attic and Egyptian art and pottery of the same period with the same frontal eye on human figures.

Athena's attribute, the owl, is still a symbol of wisdom today, though at different places and in different times, owls have symbolized other things, including dread and death.

The owl species depicted on Athenian Owls is the Athena Noctua, also called the Little Owl or Minerva Owl. Standing 6 to 8 inches and weighing 2.5 to 4.5 ounces, they range from the Mediterranean to Scandinavia. They cock their heads exactly as on the best Owl tetradrachm dies.

No coin better epitomizes Athens than the Owl, and no city was more central to Greece than Athens. Greece, in turn, was where the foundation of our way of life, the way we think and interact with one another, was built. Our philosophy, politics, education, mathematics, science, medicine, art, theater, architecture, and sport all originated in ancient Greece from relatively inchoate antecedents. The Greeks masterfully developed the very substance of our civilization from what they inherited from Mesopotamia and Egypt.

In contrast, Rome, which surpassed Greece in military success, merely took what it inherited from Greece, and to a lesser extent from Etruria, and imparted more order to it, with relatively little original thought or innovation. Rome was Greece, just more organized with its systematized roads, aqueducts, sewers, and army. There's a reason that Augustus, the first and greatest of Roman emperors, used a figure of Alexander the Great as his personal seal aside from the latter's military success, the same reason Rome granted Athens special status, regarding it as the cradle of civilization. Greece experienced a creative explosion that dwarfed what happened anywhere else through history with few exceptions, such as Sumer, Imperial China, Renaissance Europe, and arguably the post-World War II United States.

It can be enjoyable to follow Western civilization today back through key contributions by various peoples, allowing for numerous other influences along the way. Admittedly oversimplifying, the Americans gave us the nuclear age, space exploration, and the Internet, the English industrialization, the Renaissance Europeans independent thought and discovery (again), the Romans organization and Christianity, the Greeks science and democracy, the Lydians coinage, the Babylonians law, and the Sumerians how we tell time, the wheel, and writing.

Tetradrachms are the most common denomination and the largest next to the rare dekadrachms and gold staters. Owls were also minted in a host of smaller denominations, including didrachms, drachms, tetrobols, hemidrachms, diobols, trihemiobols, obols, tritartemorions, hemiobols, trihemitartemorions, tetartemorions, hemiartemorions, and bronzes. The smaller fractions, used for everyday market transactions and hoarded less, typically were struck less carefully, circulated more, and are found in worse condition than tetradrachms.

The Owl silver coinage ended in the middle of the 1st century BC, but some Athenian bronzes featuring an owl continued well into Roman Imperial times until the end of ancient Athenian coinage c. 267 AD. As you'll see, much later the Classical Owl tetradrachm was widely remembered, and honored, on coinage and elsewhere.

Coin pictured (from my collection)

Classical Owl tetradrachm (17.2g), Athens, c. 431-413 BC

The short neutral lips on this specimen represents the last of the three main mouth styles of Athena on standardized Classical Owls, and I'm calling this variety Type C. Type A depicts an Athena with a smiling mouth, Type B with a frowning mouth, and Type C with with a neutral mouth.

With Athena's short lips and asymmetrical eye that's beginning to open up at the inner corner, and with no parts of the incuse square being visible on the reverse, this coin is likely a later standardized Classical Owl, minted after the start of the Peloponnesian War c. 431 BC.

The noted numismatist T.V. Buttrey has disputed the Athenian origin of this and similarly styled Owls, giving them instead to Egypt. See Sear Greek 2526 for another similarly styled specimen. But thus far the evidence still argues in favor of Athens. There's no economic reason for Egypt to have minted Owls in great quantity. This and similar coins are of fine style, without any barbarized features, and the reverse in????ion, ATHE, remains the same as on official Athenian Owls, translating into "Of the Athenians."

The above specimen is beautifully centered and preserved, this coin has considerable charm and appeal. The archaic style, marked by still formality and lack of perspective, reinforces the notion that these coins are products of antiquity. And these coins were monumentally influential.