Euanthes, circa 450 (?). Siglos circa 450, AR 11.11 g. [e u wa te o se] in Cypriot characters. Ram lying l. Rev. ba in Cypriot characters. Ram’s head. All within incuse square. Traité II 1136 and pl. CXXVII, 8. BMC 38-39 and pl. XI, 1-2. Tziambazis 106. SNG Copenhagen –. SilCoinCy –.
Very rare. Of superb style and with a magnificent old cabinet tone, minor areas
of weakness, otherwise good very fine

Ex Naville sale V, 1923, 2772. From the duplicates of the British Museum and the Dali hoard of 1870.

Evanthes was an obscure Greek king of Salamis on eastern Cyprus now known only through his coinage. The close similarity of the ram types used on his coinage to those of Nikodamos has led to the conclusion that Evanthes was most likely the successor of Nikodamos although a case has also been argued for making Nikodamos as the predecessor of Evanthes. If Evanthes is correctly identified as the successor of Nikodamos, it has been suggested that he might have been the last Greek king of Salamis before a period of Phoenician domination that was only terminated by the rise of Evagoras I in 411 BC. Like most Greek rulers of Cypriot city-kingdoms in the fifth century BC, Evanthes struck coins with legends written using the Cypriot syllabary—a local syllabic script derived from the Linear A script used by the Minoan Bronze Age culture. In this system each character does not represent an individual letter as in the Greek alphabet, but rather a syllable. Nevertheless, the language represented by the Cypriot syllabary is a form of Greek. The late survival of the Cypriot syllabic script is truly remarkable when we consider that similar writing systems like Linear A and Linear B had largely died out elsewhere in the Greek world with the collapse of the Minoan and Mycenaean civilizations at the end of the Bronze Age.