1 hour ago, Ed Snible said:

What's your criterion for quality?  I like Baldwin's.  Their upcoming auction includes a fourrée EID MAR denarius with a 1979 pedigree.

Oh dear, 1979, what about UNESCO 1970? That's the date from which nothing should be collected after except from official sources. Ironic for a fake coin! Would Greece claim a counterfeit as its own?

Baldwin's dont have such a wide ranging selection of Greeks. 

But buying most coins appears to me to be party to a criminal conspiracy. Those Tigranes ll seem to be very recently found and no published provenance of any I've seen! Many have been sold and some are still selling and yet I have failed to hear the cuffs clinking!!  Those tens of thousand old style tetradrachms made a big hole somewhere probably I believe in Turkey, which does not sell its patrimony! I see coins particularly of celtic types of Phillip ll that have sold recently which obviously have been ripped from a Balkan soil recently, first meris tetradrachms for sale also provenance free!

So having a provenance " NewStyleKing" collection makes everything OK! Like the BM who doesn't collect coins anymore but no doubts consults auction details for research purposes .

My criterion for quality is not the appearance of the grading but the appearance of rare coins, sort after types. Say the fairly recent appearances of the tetradrachms of Abydos, Alexander Troas and Tenedos etc, coins of the Great transformation, the Stephanophores , the civic types.

Hands up, who has NOT bought a coin that had no provenance .......! C'mon where have all those coins plundered from Balkan museums after the fall of the Iron curtain, gone. Balkan Celts knows that the curators actively discouraged enquiries of their wares!  It's not just the British Museum that has its wares mined by the curatorial staff and sold on ebay!Such luminaries as Paunov and Prokopov have had enquiries ignored! 

Where does all that electrum coinage come from , new types all the time 

And how much provenance are fake ...from the collection of a master and pupil, from the collection of a man in love with art, from the collection of so and so, all collected before 1970...... who says so! Let's be honest is Greece really the home of that gold Eid Mar? How do they know? They don't know where it was minted -Patria? and or buried.  It's all hearsay with evidence from someone also untrusty!

At least I'm not a fake.

Without Lanz my collection would be nothing!  I miss him and his many hoards. I just wish the lure of the USA wasn't that strong, and yet CNG survive and make a good living.

I am a bit of a buccaneer and am amoral in my coin collecting!     Like many, many others. 

Roma Numismatics is closing on May 24th 2024.

There will no UK based quality ancient coin dealers left after that date in the UK.

I guess it has all got to do with that provenance nonsense over the gold Eid Mar stuff they hawked in the USA.  Silly on two levels for me, silly cos I don't give a stuff for provenance of coins, and silly never do silly stuff with antiquities in the USA unless you are the Getty!  

I loved Roma and bought and sold coins through them and without them I wouldn't have my example of Thompson #5, the only one in private hands!

My guess is that ALL auction houses sell fresh coins to the market and I, like others, can spot the contents of hoards being offered for sale and split up across many dealers!

Where would my collection of NewStyles be without  NumismatikLanz, and now Roma? There in the UK will be essentially only CNG.

So anybody out there? There is a UK sized gap  in the market!

The curse of provenance strikes at the really interested in coins, not the show offs and investors for who often possession is the only interest.

Teos is famed for its Griffins.

This , if you may be interested, is a  Tauropollos type coin . Obverse Zeus, reverse Bull and rider.    This example is from what used to be called the LARISSA HOARD, now called (I think)  the SITICHORO hoard. This fascinating hoard had 2 example of this very rare coin, Pan heads and a Poseidon head Perseus,Phillips, well a mixture. YOU EXPLAIN THE CHRONOLOGY!

have a look. No NewStyles but 2 INTERMEDIATE owls with devices. Just prior to the NEWSTYLE .

There is a prominent collection at the Barber  Institute of Byzantine coins. The Barber is housed in a specially built Art Deco building just adjacent to Birmingham University UK. Try that for Anastasias gold!  It has sculpture inc a magnificent bust of ? Thutmose lll and some cracking paintings and was the personal collection of a UK industrialists family...look it up ,it's online.

SNAP! (almost)

13 hours ago, JAZ Numismatics said:

It's astonishing to me that you can't own ancient coins in Greece as a private citizen. Talk about regulatory overreach. Of course, if you're rich enough, I'm sure you can circumvent the rules intended for the peasantry, as anywhere.

Are the coins in the cases even real? The Marc Antony denarii look like electrotypes.

And yet, near the plaka ( don't know the spelling), there was a shop selling genuine coins. Including a NewStyle which I handled. His prices were astronomical! I also remember some Pegasi That was c 2012.

I did wonder at the quality of the MA legionary coins too!

I arrived one day and they haa staff shortage, but I said I had come all that way to look at the Dekadrachm. So I got a personal viewing!

THE TAUROPOLOS TETRADRACHMS OF THE FIRST MACEDONIAN MERIS: PROVENANCE, ICONOGRAPHY AND DATING* * Many thanks are due to Michel Amandry for providing references to auctions and photos and also to Melih Arslan for the photo of the coin in the Sinope Museum. Sophia KREMYDI-SICILIANOU  on academia

as far as I can remember , the study was not without its critics , (BUT what isn't,The late Miss Thompson would know!), but I cannot remember any details! Sorry!      I love the Poseidon heads, I always wanted one but the NewStyles got in the way and I sold my other coins to buy more NewStyles! But I do love the later coinage of Macedon  The TauroPoulos type coins, Leg Makedonon, First & 2nd Meris, Perseus, Philip V, Aesillas, Sura,  Pro Makedon etc... They are all lovely

ANTIGONOS GONATAS: COINAGE, MONEYAND THE ECONOMY    Submitted by Panagopoulou Ekaterini for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy  HISTORY DEPARTMENT, UNIVERSITY COLLEGE LONDON JANUARY 2000

Once in my posession, Antigonus ll Gonatas a "Pan Head"  tetradrachm

OK! I'll admit Demetrius with a jnr's ticket and Phileterios with an associates one. Certainly Black Craterus's membership card was withdrawn and Ptolomey is suspected of forging his and Seleucus's. No more contenders allowed the books are closed! signed Perdiccas

Yeah, But Demetrius is not a Diadochi, son of yeah!  In the last few years lots of good quality fresh coins have appeared, particularly the Poseidon type with Demetrius sprouting horns, which I doubt he had in real life!

Philetairos not a diadochi, the coins of this eunuch "founder" of the fascinating Attalid dynasty are riddled with curiosities, Eumenes ll portrait coins, Syros coins, Aristonikos, Cistaphores, Dionysiac artists-techni and the whole who supplied the money for Myrina and Kyme and when and where and who started the fashion for lovely wreath and civic coinages of the "Great transformation" These are the best coins ever and astoundingly enough include, ta ra The Athens Newstyle! . The Phileterai  was essentially unravelled by Westmark into Vll groups....OK there are some problems, but generally accepted based on mint marks and hoards, though never seen the paper myself anywhere. Unaware of late Seleukos portraits , I once borrowed Seleucid coins from the Uni library but generally I think it avoided the issue of whose portrait is this and any discussion....although my memory could be bad.

Unaware of Lysimachus ae's totally, I'm a gold and silver man essentially!

But maybe they were sort of synonyms? Meanings meld, change, accumulate .etc, Decimate originally meant, I believe, remove 1 in 10, but the modern English would mean more likely something of far greater action indeed in many eyes, something like 9/10 and approach the word devastate, as in lay waste, which the Romans practised!  And I'm sure strict "dictionary" meanings altered in Roman times too! ( but I wasn't there at the time so it's speculation") . I'm blessed by the interest of many others in the appreciation of the NewStyle and fortunate in the times of my collecting when hoards appeared commonly, as opposed to now, and successfully amassed a world beating collection! Oh, happy prosperous times, may they NOT reoccur, why should I share my fortune! 

The southern Arabians Sa'aba ( Yeman) had the real good taste to drop their copies of the old style Athens and follow with the NewStyle, even into the Roman Imperial times

The Greek Coins Author(s): John H. Kroll and Alan S. Walker Source: The Athenian Agora, Vol. 26, The Greek Coins (1993), pp. iii-v+vii-xxvi+1-295+297- 333+335-355+357-376 Published by: The American School of Classical Studies at Athens Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/360200

My only source for Athenian bronze coins.   I used it for the Fulminating Zeus coins with pontic  symbols and the latter "NewStyle" owl on amphora bronzes that seem to echo the silver NewStyles.   I think their dating is spot on (ish)   but the rest is up for debate, unless he has published anything else!

Keep me posted!

Who and where is the source of the fakes, Bertolomi seems to be a facilitator. Will I sleep tonight with the fishes?

paper on academia amended!

Thanks for that @John Conduitt. I'm not too good at the melding/merging of photographs etc, but what you have done, thanks, shows that Indeed it is yet another new reverse and I will enter it in my academia.edu paper . 

It will have changed almost the moment she published. |Holloway in his review of NSSCA  says he went into some auction catalogues and immediately found new combinations! What I did in writing some New coin types in the Athens early NewStyles type was looking to see how rare they were and if Thompson #4 was a single year production or two?

Ans; Thompson #1, obverse 1 and 2,  no new coins since 1961 I could find in my searches, however obverse 3 seems to have 8 or 9 reverses. Maybe these minted after the first two apparent tentative tries....who knows!

Thompson#2, New Obverse  and some reverses. Same #3, . 

#4 Thompson herself found a new obverse but the ANS couldn't find the photographs,  and no  I am no wiser that it was a 1 year or a 2 year production or no!

#5, Since 1961,  a few more coins as surfaced, 2 more obverses and reverses, but still a rare coin, but still not rare enough for an imitation to be produced!

The NewStyle really took off at Thompson#6

Is it one of these?  I'm not sure, but I don't think so!