Ed Snible

Colosseum Coin Exchange did have a web site. Portions of it can be accessed through the Internet Archive, e.g. https://web.archive.org/web/20071223184640/http://www.colocoinex.com/ . There isn't enough archived to reconstruct the sales. They had mail bid sales with printed catalogs from the 1980s through the 2000s. I bought several coins from Ira at shows that had been unsold in those sales. The sale catalogs are small and the ANS library has most of of them. (I donated a few to the library). You are likely to find your coin photographed in one of those sales.

This is a very rare type. Here is another example: 1.28g, AE11 The above example was in CNG, Triton VI, January 2003, lot 1563, a group lot from the David Freedman collection. Described as 'Uncertain, possibly Selge'. It took me several years to find a published example. This coin looks exactly like the example in the Pozzi collection (Boutin's catalog, not the auction), Pozzi 3359ter. ("Ter" means third -- they needed two put two coins between 3359 and 3360; these were cataloged as 3359 2nd and 3359 third.) Boutin's catalog described the coin as Euboea, Chalkis (?). I assume only on the basis of the X (Chi). I don't really buy this because typically tiny bronzes are from Asia Minor, not Euboea. If we are going to attribute based on a single letter perhaps Caria Chalketor which at least has other coins this size. It is irresponsible to catalog this as anything other than uncertain until we find an example with a findspot. Another example was sold as Concordia Numismatic, auction 4, May 2023, lot 330. The anonymous Concordia cataloger did not even bother to suggest a continent.

Bronze coins of Mithradates the Great were often poorly struck. Here we see two strikes, each with the obverse so badly off center that the impressions barely overlap. Pontos, Komana. 85-65 BC. 5.50g AE21 O: 2x aegis with facing Gorgon in the centre. R: [Κ]OMA-Ν[ΩΝ], Nike advancing right, holding palm over shoulder, monogram to left Acquired Calgary Coin (Robert Kokotailo)

Perhaps it was 50% back in the 1990s when I started getting the catalogs? I checked the web site, https://www.hjbltd.com/#!/policy/bbs , which doesn't give a fixed percentage. The terms say "Approximately two weeks before the sale closes, HJB will go through what has not sold and decide whether to accept bids/offers made on lots."

I have found good deals in HJB sales. These are not auctions, but "Buy or Bid". 135 is the "Buy it now price". This means you can bid half that, $67.50, and likely get it. You may be able to find it slightly cheaper, but not with a nice printed catalog you can put in your library when anyone asks you to prove its "real". Only someone who really wants the coin and thinks it is worth more than the Buy It Now price will pay $135 for that Victorinus.

Here is another fisherman coin: Trajan Decius. AD 249-251. AE33, 18g. The reverse inscription is TARCOU MHTROPO LEWC / AMK / ΓB. A M K Γ B is a boast of Tarsos that means "First (A is the Greek numeral one), Greatest, and Most Beautiful city of the three provinces."

@Rand Web scraping https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_scraping is an automated software bot and can cause all kinds of problems (or not, depending on the skill of the author). I am not a lawyer. Biddr's term 4.1.a says no affecting website function. Term 4.1.b says no scraping. So I don't do either. For most auctions Biddr allows a PDF of the catalog to be downloaded. A single person could spend 30 minutes per week and download all of next week's catalogs and make them available privately to researchers. (I unsuccessfully tried to convince the ANS to have one of their library interns do it. I also suggested to BCD to have his librarian do it, but that library is shutting down. I can't remember if I suggested this to @rNumis) Currently there are no restrictions on downloading PDF catalogs and using them for research, beyond copyright. Please let's keep it that way! It would break my heart if tomorrow Biddr said it was against their rules to train an AI using manually downloaded catalogs.

The terms of Biddr prohibit scraping. You agreed to those terms when you signed up for Biddr. Eventually the people who run these sites (Biddr is run by the skayo corporation) will realize the small demand for researchers who want custom queries with CSV output and start charging for that. Until then, we should follow the rules we agreed to.

To understand their approach read this paper by Ethan Gruber and Andrew Meadows: https://dlib.nyu.edu/awdl/isaw/isaw-papers/20-6/ The people who organize conferences and write grants like Linked Open Data. They are less interested in JSON and API keys, which is what I see in the tech industry. After reading early papers on Numishare and Nomisma I was fired up to see what I could do with their APIs. I quickly learned that the museum community makes those API available to each other, but not publicly. I cannot execute a SPARQL query linking WikiData with ANS coin data. The ANS SPARQL endpoint is private.

Some of the people on this thread use "database" to mean "database engine" (e.g. Microsoft SQL Server, PostgreSQL, MySQL, or MongoDB. Other people use "database" to mean an a graphical user interface such as FileMaker or AirTable that integrated with a database. @John Conduitt asks how to get the ACSearch info without it being a manual job. I want to point out that the ACSearch terms at https://www.acsearch.info/subscribe.html forbid web scrapers. This is above and beyond copyright, and you agreed to it if you created an account. (Not to pick on ACSEarch; other systems mostly have similar rules. If you have a programmer who can scrape data you might be able to get permission if you ask nicely. I prefer to do the work manually, rather creating scrapers and asking for permission to use them. The last personal project I worked had about 500 coins. I used Excel. I had some small scripts to produce interesting visual reports and coin images with text details. If you are on your own it will be hard to do 10,000 coins. In the Introduction to Lingren III the cataloger, Dr. Lingren, says it took 2000 hours to produce a catalog of 1500 coins. More than one hour per coin to check various references of Roman provincial coinage. Can modern technology improve on that rate? 2000 hours is 50 weeks times 40 hours a week -- full time work for a year for a retired doctor. I suspect many sceattas can be IDed quickly but some will take longer. Another big source of sceatta data is the UK Portable Antiquities Schema. https://finds.org.uk/database/search/results/q/sceatta shows 2,299 sceattas. I know they have latitude and longitude for many of them, although the web site may restrict that information. A few years ago I went to a conference in New Jersey hosted by The FLAME Project. https://coinage.princeton.edu/ . The FLAME project has a map visualizer of findspot coins from "Late Antiquity". I don't know if it is open to the public. They integrated data from the Portable Antiquities Scheme. It looked amazing -- they could light up England, based on where people where losing silver coins during any date range up to 725 AD. I realize that cuts off most of the sceattas, but the point is that the academic community is gathering around the standards of nomisma.org to share data.

This was two years ago. Things may have changed. At that time, the provided _Dockerfile_ didn't work. https://github.com/ewg118/numishare/issues/119 . Let us know if things are working now. I used Vagrant to install it. It did not take minutes. Instructions here: https://github.com/esnible/numishare-vagrant . Running on a Mac under Vagrant I found it tedious to enter coins. At that time I was looking for something that made it easy to enter coins by hand, so I did not pursue the work required to make it easy to install on a Mac.

I was able to run Numishare on my laptop but found it extremely difficult to install. Only a few museums have installed it. I don't know of any individuals using it. Although the software has the ability to enter coins, my understanding is that the ANS uses it only for searching and rendering coin databases. (For data entry they use FileMaker.) If you find anything let me know.

@rvk has already posted the city as Komana, which I agree with. Most dealers don't bother to read these, merely copying the description from another lot. This can be a fun set to assemble cheaply -- until you get to Laodikeia. Michel Amandry’s 1991 paper “Le Tresor De Binbasioglu - Monnaies de Bronze des Villes du Pont Frappees sous Mithridate VI Eupator” [=The Treasure of Binbasioglu - Bronze Coins of Cities of Pontus Minted by Mithridates VI Eupator] gives the relative rarity of these; their sample of 409 coins was 72% Amisos, 12% Sinope, 9% Amastris, 4% Komana Pontica, 2.5% Kabeira, and 1% (3 coins) of Chabakta. (There were no coins of Laodikeia in the hoard.) The authors estimate that the hoard was buried in 70 BC.

I don't know the answer to this. You have many coins being stored together. Only three are changing color. I would suspect something about those three coins, rather than the environment. Those three coins aren't stable. This could indicate they were improperly cleaned. Perhaps some chemical from cleaning remains, and they need to be rinsed in distilled water?

Valerian: Honorius: CARacalla: Gordian II:

Nero:

The Perseus coins of Tyana are interesting and not well-studied. There is a pseudo-autonomous type, supposedly "time of Hadrian" although the engraving does not look as good as the Hadrian reverses. AE 19; 4.9g; ex-Alex G Malloy, auction LXIII, November 2001, lot 164. This Tyche of Tyana type is rare; only 6 specimens in RPC online. Mine is not included; I need to submit it to them. Can someone remind me how to do that? Here is a Hadrian type, same year as yours, that somehow manages to be both under-cleaned and over-cleaned: 15 mm, 2.6 gr; ex Biga Numismatics, Online Auction 1, 8 November 2020, lot 437 There is also a reverse design not seen elsewhere during Hadrian's reign, a harpa sword with the head of Medusa as the pommel! 2.46 g, 17 mm; RPC III 2956A (this coin cited)

I will attend, probably on Thursday and Saturday. On Saturday I will host the Oriental Numismatic Society educational program at 4pm.

I don't know of any other sales. The ANS library holds 75 catalogs. The catalogs aren't online, but the auction date and number of lots is available. https://donum.numismatics.org/cgi-bin/koha/opac-search.pl?q=an:43 The Fitzwilliam doesn't tell you as much, but they do say some things that aren't in the ANS library catalog. https://www.fitzmuseum.cam.ac.uk/dept/coins/library/salescatalogue/SALECO-R.html I don't know if your system allows you to show metadata about a firm beyond their city and state, but it can be helpful to have this information when researching.

It would be wonderful if someone was saving catalogs via download, "print to PDF", or crawling sites. For every ancient coin auction. This data could become valuable in the future.

1890s Bulgarian coins were struct at Kremnica in Slovakia. (This is the oldest operating European mint, they have been making money since 1328.) I feel Slovakia should have the primary claim to the two Bulgarian coins. The culture that produced the Bulgarian coins was Slovakian. Perhaps it could be argued that Austria has an even better claim to the Bulgarian coins, because the engraver of Bulgaria 5 leva, Anton Scharff, was Austrian. The coins merely circulated in Bulgaria. Did the Bulgarian coins even circulate in Bulgaria? They were struck on the standard of the Latin Monetary Union, and thus could have circulated in France, Belgium, Italy, and Switzerland. Perhaps this is why they were returned to Italy?

Do you mean a transfer of the shape? I have seen Saflips "go white" at a high-point because the coin has caused them to stretch there. Or do you mean that you see patina on the flip? I have seen printer ink from the card insert transfer to a flip, but nothing from a coin. I have noticed that Saflips crack if I open them 100 times to pull out the coin, but vinyl ones do not. If people are to inspect the coins I wouldn't want them in Saflips. Some dealers will heat-seal coins to prevent theft during inspection. I think Stacks did this for a while. Saflips don't easily heat-seal.

With snake brassiere: Ionia. Klazomenai. Pseudo-autonomous issue circa c. 180-218 AD? Bronze Æ. 15 mm, 2.17 g. Obv: Helmeted Athena wearing aegis, right Rev: Winged boar on runway, poised for takeoff Ref: SNG Cop. 114-5v; BMC 111-2; RPC IV online 907

If you had asked for pyramids in general, this 20 centavos from Mexico beats your entries.

I had this happen in February with a package sent from Poland. The sender wrote "Stany Zjednoczone" below my address, which is Polish for "United States". The USPS algorithm decided "Stany Zjednoczone" was probably the name of a city in North Carolina. USPS computers would send it to NC, the NC postmaster would send it back to NY. If you go to your local USPS branch there will be managers there who have the ability to get more information than you can get online. They aren't supposed to tell you exactly what they see -- but they can often see scans of the envelope and where the USPS computers think the envelope should go.