87. Melita e Gaulos: due identità territoriali a confronto attraverso il documento monetale

In the years following the Roman conquest in 218 BC, Melita and Gaulos started to produce their own bronze coinage. The largest island in the Maltese archipelago struck 11 issues. The last one was minted at the end of the Republican age, when Gaulos also minted its only issue. Their coinage is very different in terms of types and languages. Melita uses a multiplicity of types and all of them are religious images (heads of divinities, gods, objects or animals related to them). The legends are written in Punic, Greek or Latin. On the contrary, the coins from Gaulos have military types: a helmeted female head on the obverse and a warrior on the reverse. The inscriptions are always in Greek. The aim of this paper is to study how the identity of the two islands is expressed by their coins, comparing their types and legends with literary sources, archaeological and epigraphical evidence and coins minted in Roman times by towns in Sicily.