NathanB

Restitutor, I love Nerva also. He also contributed some early steps towards building the social safety net--measures that the other "good emperors" would expand on. But about choosing his successor, my understanding was that this was essentially forced on him. Of course, we are glad he went along with it!

"The eyes do not err if the mind governs them." -- The coin: SELEUKID KINGDOM. Seleucus, but uncertain which one(!). AE 16 mm, 4.9 g. Obv: Artemis; rev: Apollo, seated on omphalos, with BASILEOS SELEUKOU on either side. It's a very humble coin, but it is one of my favourite coin photographs that I have taken, and I think the design fits very well with the proverb. The quote: proverb by Publilius Syrus (active 85–43 BC/BCE).

The coin does exist, Kamnaskires!

@sand, I enjoyed reading your description of your experience in the museum! I've had a few similar experiences. One was in a museum that had a traveling exhibit relating to the Mongols of the time of Ghengis Khan. I bought a book ("Storm from the East") that I read voraciously, and which I still own. Reading it was a fascinating experience! Another moment, but this one out of a museum, is one I remember: when I first saw references to the Khwarazmian Empire--in the book above, if I remember correctly. It's a part of history I still know very little about, but I would love to learn more.

@TheTrachyEnjoyer, the reverse of that lead seal is amazing! Those figures have incredible detail, and stylization in the case of the two smaller figures. But what astounds me most of all is the--for lack of a better word--asiatic feel of the central figure. To me, as someone who's never got around to learning very much about Byzantine art, he looks like a depiction of a king on the far western regions of China, or maybe Mongolia or the vast regions of central Asia. Can you comment on his appearance? Is this what a Byzantine emperor looked like? And if so, when did they start to look like that?

Yes--a great idea for a thread! I have actually been wanting to build a generator of random quotes on money, coins, or numismatics, or ancient history or philosophy, and then pair them up with a random image of my coins. THRACE. Maroneia. AE 16 mm. 3.66 g. C. 400-350 BCE. Obv: prancing horse; rev: grapes in vine. "I am compelled to write at length on this point because people now are largely ignorant of the ancient writings." Simplicius of Cilisia on the philosopher Parmenides. This quote was written more than 1,500 years ago.

I take deep offense, David. That does it! I don't know how I will survive here--anywhere--knowing that you are crossposting on CT! 😉 Seriously, I really don't think it matters. Post wherever you like! For myself, though, I will only post here. I was in a self-imposed exile from CT when the big brouhaha went down there, so I completely missed it. I had actually more or less decided to stop posting anywhere, but when in the fulness of time--har har!--Severus Alexander suggested I come here, I did, and was glad of it. It's fun to be posting again, although I'm trying to stay away from controversial political topics that seem to invariably cause misunderstanding and then ad hominem attacks. That can be hard at times because there are political aspects to our hobby, and politics is built right into the coins themselves in many cases. But overall, I think I'm succeeding. And I have to say, it seems that the posters here also seem more pleasant and relaxed here to a greater degree now than then. I like the atmosphere here at numisforums quite a lot. What I don't miss about CT is watching the trolls just gratuitously and angrily insulting people left, right, and center and then engaging in prolonged flame wars of a very jejune nature. I don't know if this is still going on, but I feel that where we are now is a much cleaner and more peaceable place to be. My only wish is that this site would be busier, with a greater variety of topics here being posted more often. But I think that can come with time--it's doing great, and not only considering its age can still be conveniently measured in weeks!

Every now and then, I search "Indo-Greek coin" on eBay. Invariably, the bulk of what I see are very obvious fakes. And they're clearly identified as such, too--provided you know the weights [edit: or are practiced enough to spot obvious fakes--not everyone is, sadly]. It pisses me off, because these you-know-what-orifices are busy selling cheap fakes as if they were real, and apparently there are a lot of people in the world who simply don't know the difference. They're not getting into too much trouble with the payment processors because by clearly posting their (ridiculous) weights, they avoid having any serious buyers buy their wares. I've tried reporting them in the past, but eBay does nothing. There oughtta be a law!

On a somewhat related note, I've been wishing we could have blogs here. There are some people I could really learn a lot from, and I'd like to chart my own progress on one as well.

@velarfricative, I think you've done the board a service by pointing out the various fakes that you have. And you were right about this specific coin that Severus Alexander and you were discussing. But you are very wrong in interpreting his remarks as "snide." Severus Alexander is a very--well, I mean this in only the best of ways--old-fashioned--poster here. He's gentlemanly, classy, supportive, and he has a good sense of humour. There was no humour or snideness in his remarks to you, which I interpreted as a direct and civil plea for care when making sweeping generalizations about auction houses. I think the message you received was not a message that he was sending. All the best, N.

In the very recent past, I had one auction that waited many days to send me an invoice.

I'm out of the age bracket, but when I was a kid, I enjoyed reading about several of the empires in the meme, and I find all of them interesting today. Nowadays, I tend to be fascinated with the American empire, and I do worry about the so-called Thucydides Trap.

Great question! I need answers nearly as much as you do, but I do have a few unrelated, but I hope fascinating, tidbits for you. 1. On my bookshelf I have John Melville-Jones's A Dictionary of Ancient Greek Coins; I do not have any such resource yet for the Roman side, so hopefully others can fill in the gap there. Here is the entry for "demonetize": 2. On the Bactrian and Indo-Greek side of things, the Pleripus of the Erythraean Sea mentions the longevity and acceptance of Indo-Greek coins in the city of Barygaza in India nearly two centuries after the death of Menander I Soter: 3. After years of searching, I lucked out a few weeks ago and found the only copy advertised anywhere in the world--as far as I can see, of John Melville-Jones's Testimonia Numaria, Vol. 1: Texts and Translations, which now joins its much more common companion volume 2 on my shelf. Well, technically, it's on my lap as write this! Anyway, on page 37, he cites Aristotle, who wrote in his Economics, II, ii, 4: 4. In one of my all-time favourite passages relating to numismatics, Aristophanes in his work Frogs has his chorus complain: Somebody wasn't happy about the newfangled, low-quality, fiat currency! I have always wondered what he was complaining about since I've never heard of Athenian bronze coins from this time. However, in his commentary volume, Melville-Jones indicates that the most likely interpretation of these lines is in regards to the emergency silver-plated bronze coins mentioned above. 5. Aristophanes has more to say in his play Ecclesiazusae, which references the demonetization of the emergency issue coins: 6. There is also an apocryphal story related by Plutarch regarding the Spartan lawgiver Lycurgus, who was said to have prohibited the use of coinage in precious metals, substituting in their place a currency of iron. Melville-Jones speculates that this might be referring to roasting-spits. However, he also says that "the tone of these excerpts is moralising, and the story should be regarded as an invention." If it was a story rather than history, it was certainly a well-known one, since Justin and others also bear witness to it (from The Epitome of Pompeius Trogus): -- I hope someone will fill us in on the Roman side of things--especially in regards to whether ordinary bronze coins were ever demonetized (in addition to DLTcoins's excellent example).

Dear Overwhelmed Expat, Hey! Welcome to the hobby, and congratulations on your first ancient coin! As someone who knows what it means to feel overwhelmed in ways big and seemingly small, your comment made me want to give you some friendly advice. First, remember the cliche about "the main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing." You bought this coin for your own enjoyment, so don't sweat and stress over what to do next. 😉 Maybe you become the next very famous collector of ancient coins. Maybe you decide just one is enough for you. Or, more likely, you acquire a collection of coins that interest you--somewhere in the middle. Whatever you decide is right for you. Maybe it's best if you imagine a baby. Now imagine if this baby were quite prodigious, and was exposed to sports like hockey, cycling, basketball, water polo, and so on. Now imagine our little friend getting stressed out because they don't know what they want to do! Fortunately, what babies actually do is take baby steps; they become toddlers. They toddle up and fall down and eventually learn to get back up again. They crawl and walk and eventually in due course they become children and then hopefully adults who enjoy moving and doing. The way I see it, you are an ancient coin collector baby. Don't worry. You don't have to get everything "right" immediately. Just take your baby steps, at your own pace. I do have some suggestions, of course. I think I'll put them in bullet form: remember the adage "buy the book before the coin." I don't mean this literally or in an absolute sense, but your purchases will be better informed by reading--whether history, or about ancient coins look at pictures of coins. Look at how much they cost. Learn what attracts you. don't spend enormous sums of money now (unless you are Warren Buffet or something!) do spend modest (or perhaps very modest) sums now and then, and see how you feel about your purchases. You will learn more about what you like in this way, and that will make you wiser for future purchases. spend a bit of time thinking about what interests you. It's ok if this takes time. For some collectors, history is foremost. For others, it's numismatic grade. For still others, it's the designs themselves. And of course, there are others who collect around themes. You might decide you want to collect bronze coins of a particular emperor or city. You might have several themes you collect around. Or, like Johnny Worricker when he shows his neighbour into his home, you might have an apparently random collection of beautiful artworks based on one simple principle: you buy what you like. At this stage, it's far too soon to pick a specialization, which eventually is what many collectors end up doing. But bear in mind you don't have to! buy one or two books that offer an introduction to the hobby. Or, find some websites that offer something along the same lines. As you learn more, you will find that new ideas present themselves to you as avenues to explore. Similarly, you may find that some areas don't do anything for you at all. Follow people on this site whose writings interest you. They might be experts. They might be humourists. Or, they might be just a few steps ahead of you. I enjoy reading @thenickelguy. He is relatively new to the hobby, but he gets a tremendous amount of enjoyment out of some very modest purchases (meaning no disrespect, as the ratio of emotional value to cost is an excellent one). Then he posts pictures of them here, so he gets not just the enjoyment of the coins themselves, but the enjoyment of sharing them. He's learning about presentation, about photography, about how to talk about coins, and about how to make friends (and I mean that as someone who looks up to him for this accomplishment rather than the reverse). In short, I admire pretty much everything he does here. I think he's an excellent example of someone newer to the hobby who is getting a lot of enjoyment out of it, and who is learning a lot about it without such learning being burdensome. As an aside, when I started to get interested in ancient coins, for many, many, many months, I had only one ancient coin in my entire "collection." (It was all I could afford at the time, and it is still the most expensive coin I have ever owned (my avatar). But I got a lot of mileage out of that coin! I used it to learn about culture, about history, about ancient coinage, trade, diplomacy, and so on. And then, eventually, I bought another, only about 20% of the value of the first one. Now, I can pick up small coins for less than $20 (in any currency) that still manage to bring me a lot of joy. And, at the same time, I have longer-term collecting goals that I am slowly working towards. Not having the money to buy everything I want now isn't ideal, of course, but it's a necessity that I have turned into a virtue of sorts as I learn more between purchases, and get more pleasure out of the ones I do make. That's a path I recommend, although it may not work for you. But whatever does: you'll be fine. Good luck! -- UPDATE: I realize that my advice contradicts my experience of buying my most expensive coin first. I actually don't recommend you do that. In my case, I actually had a goal of buying this coin for more than a decade before actually buying it. (Coincidentally, I, too, was an expat when I first decided to buy this type of coin.) But all that time, I was outside the hobby, of course. I have no regrets at all, but I think for most people it's better to spend small at the beginning, and learn about the field, before dumping less modest sums into it. -- One last update: one thing I do strongly recommend is buying coins with eye appeal. That doesn't mean they have to cost a fortune. Let's say you want to buy a coin that is so utterly common you could buy a cheap and largely worn one for $5. But you could buy a much better coin for only $25. And you'd get even more eye appeal for $50. My advice is to refrain from buying coins that are too cheap but which lack eye appeal. Find your happy medium, whether that be $20, $40, or $75, or whatever. But it's always worth spending at least a few extra dollars to get a coin that looks significantly better, and that you will not be regretful of at a later stage.

I don't have any, but in the early 19th century, Ceylon issued coins with a face value of 1/192 of a Rixdollar. Pretty cool fraction! (Image is a gilt proof coin rather than a business strike, taken from here.)

The members here appear to have let the angels of their better nature overpower their spidey senses. I think this will probably have to be my last word on this particular matter. However, for future reference, and speaking in general terms rather than in relation to this particular thread, I would like to draw everyone's attention to a few things, best exemplified by this eBay ad for a fake ancient coin. Note the manner of presentation: calipers: check scale: check picture of the rim: check absolutely horrible, unrealistic overall appearance: check specs, including the weight(!): check eBay has literally hundreds of such ads for modern fake coins at any one time. In the past, I have even seen orange calipers in the pictures. Now imagine the seller or maker of this coin saying "a lot of work went into producing it, so it must be an ancient piece." Unscrupulous sellers try to overwhelm would-be buyers through the use of technical presentation, Nigerian-Prince-email-style diction, and verbal and visual red herrings. Speaking in very general terms, just because someone says they are not selling anything doesn't mean that they aren't doing research on behalf of someone who is. A person who is interested in ancient coins may come here to learn about them. But a person who wants help pretty much exclusively with feedback on (fake) ancient coins in their possession, which they then defend as authentic (before being forced to back off), is someone to beware of.

I'm struggling to put words that are mannerly to the thoughts in my head, but here goes. I have deep misgivings, not just about the coin, but also about the original post and the content posted here. 1) The coin looks like a bad modern imitation and nothing else. 2.) Being asked to download material from a random link puts me off. If someone has data to share about a coin they want information about, then they should just type it up normally or copy and paste. 3.) The misuse of the word "forensic." That word means legal. Nothing here is related to the law in any way whatsoever. 4.) The claim by the poster that a metalogical analysis can reveal the age of the coin. That's complete B--well, everyone knows the rest. XRF scans and the like determine the metallic content of a coin that the machine can read. They do not in any way indicate the age of a coin. Period. 5.) The claims by the OP that the coin must somehow be ancient and that it must be hammered, and that the presence of "Makedonian alphabet koine" lettering means that it is somehow authentic. If anything, I think all of us should be flagging this post rather than playing along with it.

I love this meme supplied by Orange Julius the other day--it captures me at my ideal best very nicely! In my case, the coin I ordered--a cheap bronze coin, and nothing special--took a very roundabout way here. Purchased from the UK, it was sent to my old address and remained there, despite mail forwarding. Nearly one month after its arrival there, I finally managed to get it! This was a lot of waiting for one little coin! And here it is, in a very "quick 'n' dirty" pair of photos: Seleucus I Nikator, AE 17.9 mm, 5.9 g. Nothing special, but not a bad little coin!

That right there is a thing of great beauty. I am very happy for you, though envious, too!

Hi again DLTcoins--and thank you for the link! I will read it later, but I skim-read it, and also read the conclusion. About Britain, though, I think the situation is quite different from the situation in the US. First, the main American states are surrounded by two massive oceans, and were not part of regular, established trading networks with the Mediterranean in antiquity. That alone makes the situations as different as apples and oranges. Second, the coins found in the US are ordinary Greek and Roman coins. On the other hand, Britain is very close to continental Europe, and was part of the Roman Empire, and before that, part of trading routes with the Phoenicians and the Greeks. Well-known, well-established patterns of trade with the Mediterranean were in place there for many hundreds of years in antiquity, and those links are attested through archaeological and textual evidence. Furthermore, as we have seen from some of the other links provided in the comments above, coins routinely traveled very far in antiquity from their original minting sites--if not as currency, then as talismans, collectibles, or souvenirs. Why should the situation in the UK be any different? So I don't really see any reasons to be skeptical of the fact that coins made journeys of enormous lengths within the established trading routes of the Mediterranean during the period of antiquity, and that some of these coins ended up in Britain. In addition, the coins I am thinking about are Indo-Greek, Indo-Scythian, and Kushan coins. Again, I just don't think there were that many careless collectors of these coins in 19th century Britain. And while it's certainly possible that a small number of these finds should be discounted, it also seems reasonable to conclude that certain finds have a high probability of being ancient losses. Finally, in the UK, many coins that we accept as being found in various places are not dug up in an archaeological context. People find coin hoards using metal detectors, for example, and there is still evidence that we can read about how such coins were found, and where. With the study of history, there are, as you likely know, "maximalist" and "minimalist" approaches to finds and even texts. I certainly do think it's wrong to be too credulous, but I think refusing to believe much of anything as a kind of starting point, puts the cart before the horse by beginning with a conclusion that should have been achieved rather than simply asserted. Overall, in many cases, one can't simply "prove it" regarding many of the phenomena of ancient history. (As much as I share your desire for positive proof!) We have to weigh probabilities, in context--archaeological, historical, economic, and so on. And I think in many cases that lines up to a reasonable conclusion that coins in antiquity could and often did travel great distances from their minting sites--again, not necessarily as currency (though that was often the case, as for Athenian tetradrachms and Roman denarii), but as interesting artefacts for "show and tell."

Thank you, Kaleun; that is a great resource! Thanks for the map, too: it shows me what the tool is capable of. Very interesting stuff! And equal praise to @Ed Snible and @rrdenarius! Those are also great resources. I am very much looking forward to using them. Finally, my thanks to ValiantKnight, JayAg47, maridvnvm, Cordoba, and everyone else who contributed to this (at least to me!) very fascinating thread! And @Romismatist, I love your coin! Definitely "heart eyes" for that one!

Hi DLTcoins! You bring up a very interesting point. If you click on the link I provided (as maybe you have), you will see further links to the Portable Antiquities Scheme. Of the four Menander coins in Britain, one is specifically said to be more likely to be a loss from post-antiquity--so this may be along the lines you suggest. In another case, however, a find in the late 19th century of a Menander coin two feet underground seems likely to be an ancient loss rather than a modern one. There are also another three Menander coins that are not listed in the PAS. In addition, there are a number of Indo-Scythian coins, and Kushan coins, also. I tend to agree with the concluding remarks from Dr. Green's blog post linked to above: It's impossible to say anything with certainty, but I tend to think that there weren't such a large number of carless Indian coin collectors present in 19th and 20th century Britain. 😉

I've been wondering lately if there are any kind of resources that track how far away from their mints ancient Greek and Roman coins travelled in antiquity. In particular, I'm thinking of the Indo-Greek king Menander. I once read that Menander coins have been found as far away as the UK. I decided to google this to find some details, and I did find a great site with excellent links and details. So that is quite impressive: Menander's coinage was minted in the area of Afghanistan and Pakistan, and yet at least a few of his coins made their way in antiquity as far west as England and even Wales. I think that's fascinating! And we know, thanks to the Periplus of the Erythraean Sea, that some of Menander's coins were in use centuries later in the Gujarat area. And I seem to recall reading somewhere that some of Menander's coins have been found in Sri Lanka, which is also very interesting. I'm wondering if any of Menander's coins have been found even farther afield than that--specifically east, such as China, southeastern Asia, and beyond--and in any other directions as well! Can anyone help me with this? And feel free to also supply anecdotes and information about this question in general, too--for ancient Greek and Roman coins, and not only for the coinage of Menander. How far away from their minting sites did these coins travel in antiquity?

Hi Longinus/Deacon Ray! Ah-ha! So now I know why the art seemed to be the same! You have a real talent for digital presentation of ancient coins! I definitely admire it. Regarding the other site, I stopped posting there a long time ago, and so I missed all the fuss that caused so many people to migrate here. I'm still not 100% certain of what happened, exactly. (No need to explain--that's ok.) Anyway, I ended out getting an email sort of out of the blue that mentioned this site, and then I decided I'd try writing again--but this time, I'm staying clear of politics entirely! That can be very hard because ancient politics is a major part of ancient numismatics, and ancient politics intersect with modern politics. But I will try to stay clear anyway.