Description
The discovery in February 1946 at Stavrokonnou, in the Paphos district, of a treasure containing many hundreds of Lusignan silver coins, concealed not long after 1489, made Cypriot coins of the fifteenth-century coinage. It was rescued for science by the late Professor J.R. Stewart, the distinguished Australian archaeologist, who sadly did not live to see his book about the Lusignan coinage published. The notes which he left, and the hundreds of plaster casts of coins from the Stavrokonnou hoard, where invaluable in the preperation of this, the third and final volumeof the corpus of Lusignan coins, covering the years 1382-1489. It takes into account also the relatively few silver coins which supplemented the silver in the currency of Cyprus. The main purposes of the volume are to present arguments about how the coins should be classified, and to give good photographic illustrations of speciments struck from all the known dies, on 36 plates of high quality. The conclusions for the monetary history of Cyprus are discussed, and possible lines for future research are indicated.