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Page| |---------- Interesting Things About Ancient Coins
----------| |River Gods on Ancient Coins| |You can click on any
coin image to see the full coin.| Anyone who collects ancient
Greek coins will eventually come across some monstrous creatures
which appear to be combinations of man and bull. These are river
gods. Gods were everywhere to the ancient Greeks, and like other
natural forces, oceans and big rivers all had their own deities.
There is plenty of evidence that river gods were conceived as
being like bulls, perhaps because of the way they charged ahead
with unstoppable momentum. On coins, they were combinations of
man and bull. Sometimes the whole creature was shown, and
sometimes just the head. These coins often came from towns by
the sea, where their river was at its largest. The coin on the
right shows the deity of the longest river in Greece, the
Acheloos (anglicised from the Greek Αχελωος). This is the head
of a mature, heavily bearde