Ed Snible

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.

I attended a great talk by John Deyell on these coins at an ONS meeting during the New York International.  Unfortunately, it was before the ONS was recording talks for YouTube.  He is the world expert on these coins.

Your coin looks to have a little red.  My understanding is that red color on these coins may indicate they were used in a religious event.  Don't clean it.

Dealers like to call coins that are a mix of gold and silver "electrum".  They like to call a mix of gold and copper "base gold".

I must warn anyone else collecting these that I saw -- and even purchased -- a modern fake of this coin at the New York International about six years ago.  Luckily I showed it to some folks at the ONS dinner who explained the problems.  (I was able to return it.)

Nice coin @panzerman.  Here's another:

INDIA, Post-Kushan (Jammu and Kashmir). Kidarite Successors. Yasovarman. 5th century AD. Pale AV Dinar (23mm, 7.58 g, 12h).   From the William F. Spengler (1923-2005) Collection.

The Canandian numismatist John Deyell wrote a book about these coins, TREASURE, TRADE AND TRADITION: POST-KIDARITE COINS OF THE GANGETIC PLAINS AND THE PUNJAB FOOTHILLS, 590–820 CE.  It may have the answers you seek.  I have a copy but seem to have misplaced it.

The example pictured above was issued by Yasovarman, and is considered the earliest, with the highest gold content.  There are tables in the book of average gold content for each ruler.  The gold content went down over time.

5 hours ago, kirispupis said:

i wonder if George Hill is referring to a different type.

Hill calls the type Apollo, so it is a different type.  I brought it up because it wasn't on the list of MY bow candidates and was similar in size to your coin.

The pictures are so bad that I can't tell if it is really Apollo or even male.

Thanks, @rNumis!  At one time I kept links to references, but I stopped because the site "Digital Library Numis" was doing it better than I could.  That site has been dark for a while, although they continue to post updates.  Does anyone know the situation with that site?

The Weber catalog points to BMC.  Here is the plate:

https://books.google.com/books?id=F2wCAAAAYAAJ&pg=PT29#v=onepage&q&f=false

Luckily, George Hill has explained that the head/Bow with MY is attributed to Myra based on the markets they appeared in first: "The strongest evidence in favour of Myra is that adduced by Borrell who says 'Four examples of this coin have been in my possession at different times and as I have noticed they were all brought from the Lycian coast or from the island of Rhodes.' Unless a northern provenance can be proved for other specimens it seems best to revert to Borrell's attribution."

See https://books.google.com/books?id=F2wCAAAAYAAJ&pg=PR53#v=onepage&f=false

I like where you are going with this!

I was unable to find any references to this type other than the Imhoof-Blumer you have already mentioned.

https://books.google.com/books?id=tcIsAQAAMAAJ&pg=PA90#v=onepage&f=false and https://books.google.com/books?id=tcIsAQAAMAAJ&pg=PT11#v=onepage&f=false

The ISGRIM database once said there was a small bronze,  Apollo Hd R / Bow with inscription "MY" from Myra in Lycia.  This is cataloged as Weber Collection 7283.  Unfortunately I can only find Weber volume 1 and 2 online so I cannot check what information he had.

Here is another bee, but not from Ionia:

PHOENICIA, Gabala? AE, 11.5mm, 1.49g
Obv: Gorgoneion
Rev: Bee (or fly?)
 

Although dealers have started to attribute this to Praisos on Crete, Henri Seyrig attributed it to Gabala in Syria ("Monnaies hellénistiques", Revue Numismatique (1964)) and dated it to 55/54 BC.

The inscription is probably a date.  I feel like I should be able to read it.  Unfortunately I am not certain if it is in Greek or Phoenician, and which direction is is going.

These are not as scary, but fit with the Halloween theme:

This one is a masterpiece and you should let me show it to you in person sometime:

Portugal, 1975. Vasco Berardo (1933-2017). Mintage: 400. 90 mm (3 1/2 inches), 285 g
Obv: 25 ano dos Direitos Homem (“25 years of human rights”) / 1949 1974; hand in front of man's face; artist’s signature to right
Rev: Text from the declaration; scarecrow
Edge: 74 and privy mark

It won medal of the year at FIDEM in Poland in 1975.

Here is my favorite flying mammal:

France, 1969. Madeleine-Pierre Querolle (1914 — 2014). Monnaie de Paris? Bronze, 180.0g, 68mm.
Obv: Explorer wearing headlamp emerging from cave in mountains above city
Rev: SPELEOLOGIE; Bat in cave; signed Querolle
 

Portugal, uncertain year. Cabral Antunes (1916-1986), after Spain, 1890, Enrique Simonet Lombardo (1866-1927). 90 mm, 261 grams
Obv: THE ANATOMY OF THE HEART Painting by Enrique Simonet
Rev: Molecule; chemist; Merck Sharp & Dohme. Indomethacin molecule.
 

1 hour ago, kirispupis said:

Here's my Atarneos. This particular coin has puzzled me a bit. The obverse + reverse are definitely the type of Atarneos, but the inscription seems to have a 'D' with one letter preceding it.  The snake mark is also known from Atarneos, but I haven't found any examples with this monogram.

BMC includes several similar monograms.  https://books.google.com/books?id=ar0tAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA1#v=onepage&q&f=false

No D P A, but perhaps a D, and a P A.

A very interesting coin, @kirispupis.  Having the only example of an ancient Greek city is a pretty big deal!

When I started collecting Greek coins I was told that there are about 600 cities.  200 common, 200 rare, and 200 extremely rare.

Now that we have public databases of coin sales and museum collections we can quickly get a sense of the scarcity of cities.

Your city, Artake, has one hit in acsearch.info.  A unique coin from a unique city, with only one sale recorded in recent decades.

I looked at my own coins of Mysian cities.  The rarest Mysian city in my collection is Atarneus/Atarneos, with 25+67 hits in acsearch:

Atarneus / Atarneos, AE9, 1.15g, circa 350 BC
ex-CNG, Triton VI, January 2003, lot 1563 (part of; ex David Freedman collection)

It is my hope that your coin is a unique coin of Artake.  The letters A, R, T, A in a wheel could also be the start of Atarneos.  I wonder if Plankenhorn had a findspot or other information to exclude a southern Mysian city?

Here are two coins with unusual designs.

ASIA MINOR. Uncertain. Diobol. 11 mm. 1.08 g.
Obv: Forepart of winged goat (or griffin?) right.
Rev: Facing head of panther (or Cerberus?) within incuse circle with mane of snakes.
Ref: UNPUBLISHED TYPE cf. CNG 73, September 2006, lot 419. (no snakes).
ex-Numismatik Naumann, Auction 46, September 2016, lot 182

It is hard to see, as the coin is so small, but it is clear the reverse animal has snake hair.  This could mean it is a hydra.  Also, the the three-headed dog Cerebus had a mane of snakes. (e.g. this kylix, and this hydria).  What animal is this?

CILICIA, Isaura (?). Circa 333-322 BC? AR Hemiobol.  6.5mm, 0.32 g.
Obv: Head of Herakles facing slightly left (within aegis!)
Rev: Head of lion facing slightly right.
Ref: Tevfik Göktürk. “Small coins from Cilicia and surroundings” #87
ex-CNG, e-auction 385, October 2016, lot 268 (Attributed as Gokturk #86)

The interesting thing about this tiny coin is that the head of Herakles appears to be in the center of an aegis.  Typically, it is the head of Medusa that appears in the aegis.  There is no reason why others can't appear there -- the aegis is a symbol of Athena's protection, and there are even examples of Athena's head appearing on her own aegis.  But it is strange to see Herakles (if it is indeed him) mounted within an aegis.
 

I have never done this.

I believe you need to declare all coins over 100 years old.

When entering or returning to the United States the rules are https://www.cbp.gov/sites/default/files/assets/documents/2020-Jun/Works of art etc ICP_0.pdf

If anyone has declared coins over 100 years old at Customs, I am curious to know what happened and how long it took to happen.

@JayAg47 Your coin is Moroccan, https://en.numista.com/catalogue/pieces1102.html or a smaller denomination.

It hard to tell from a photo, but is it possible the ivy crown has sharp lines and is XF, while the rest of the coin is F condition?

If so, then the ivy is newer than the rest of the coin.

Could it be a magistrate?  Münsterberg lists a magistrate Νίκαιος for Pheneos in Arcadia.  That probably isn't right but coins named only to magistrates can be very difficult to attribute.

Here is a coin that stumped me for years:

This turkey (with a 1980 provenance to Clark's Ancients) was attributed to Abdera by some dealer (presumably Mr. Clark).

The only writing on the coin is "ΑΝΔΡΟΝΙΚ" which turns out to be a magistrate.  Another example of this magistrate was sold in 1864 (Rollin et Feuardent, Catalogue d'une collection de médailles des rois et des villes de l'ancienne Grèce (1864), #3160).  I have found no other examples of this magistrate.

I bought this coin in 2004.  I attributed it in 2016.  The correct attribution is Ambrakia, 238-168 BC (?); Cf. SNG Copenhagen 35-37 (magistrate).

If you are wondering about the designs on this coin it is "Zeus head right" and "ΑΝΔΡΟΝΙΚ; Griffin crouching right".

I bought this coin for $13 from Clark's Ancients, list 119, November 2004, lot 302 (James Lovette collection).  Clark's 2004 sales catalog had no pictures, just grades.  If I had seen a photo of this coin I would have passed, but it is one of my favorites today because of the difficulty of its attribution.

16 hours ago, Corbita said:

I'm curious to know - several of you mention that this type of coin is specifically one to watch out for because of prevalance of fakes. Is there something about the design or shape of the Apollonia Pontika that allows it to be convincingly faked in this method that fools even A-list dealers like HJB? Or is this a case of the coin being targeted for being faked due to its design, demand etc by some highly skilled forgers?

• The coins of Apollonia Pontika were rare when the iron curtain was up, and few Western dealers saw many originals.
• Many genuine coins were suddenly on the market and buyers were very trusting about this new region to buy coins from.
• Many people skilled in casting (jewelers, dental workers) were suddenly without funds when Communism stopped and the economy collapsed.
• Enough people interested in artifacts that museums sold replicas openly (meaning people who made coins for these shops were needed.)
• Fake diobols were produced in 1990, and unmasked, and there was a desire to produce something to fool Western buyers.  Forgers did extra work like hammering coins instead of pressing them, and making many different dies.
• There were enough forgers that they could learn from each other
• It takes a different skill set to recognize style in a facing-head coin than a profile coin.  (Many of you will be surprised to know that fake denarii can fool me!  The reason I got good at spotting facing head fakes is that I only look at facing head coins.)

Many pawnshops and "we buy gold" places have these machines.

I visited more than 20 of them.  None of them would analyze for a fee, or let me operate the machine.  (Three shops would do it for free for one or two coins.)

I had several coins analyzed in pawnshops and a couple of dozen more at the house of a colleague who has one of the machines (who lives 5 hours away from me).  I ended up with XRF results for about thirty coins with no cash outlay.

The machines produced consistent numbers for the silver coins (front vs back, different parts of the coin).  As expected, placement made a big different with fourrees.  I only scanned one bronze coin.

I don't want to give away when I am writing about next, but here is a chart of XRF results:

I took some silver coins and measured copper, gold silver, and lead content and calculated ratios and plotted them on this triangle graph.  Each shape/color is another kind of coin.  I wanted to see if the coins in blue and the coins in black are from the same mint.  I was able to show that the black examples have more gold, but it isn't super convincing that they have different origins, because there are some black points with low gold content and some blue points with high gold content.

With two coins you will have a hard time being sure of the results.  I didn't have enough coins to get good results.  The idea is to get a lot of coins and use statistics.  If you are mathematically inclined read this paper by professor Kenneth Sheedy: https://www.academia.edu/44438852/Studies_in_Athenian_Silver_Coinage_Analysis_of_Archaic_Owl_Tetradrachms_MiN6_pp_207_214

He got a grant to take an XRF gun to various museums around the world and point it at their Athenian tetradrachms and write papers like these with the results.

Here is a third cast-mate, which I photographed at the New York International in January 2019, and was subsequently sold on VCoins. Weight 3.16g:

This example was in a bag of 30 specimens which I believe were all cast fakes, all of different molds.

The rims on these coins are perfect -- so perfect that I bought a coin from this bag, even though I know to be wary of the type.  I examined the rim under 15x loupe for more than 5 minutes before purchasing, and for hours afterward.

Nine of the coins in this bag have identified cast-mates.  Yours makes the tenth (however I stopped looking few years ago.)

My belief is that these are cast through channels in the front or back, because every one has some kind of weird bump or flaw on the obverse or reverse.  The ones I saw lacked casting bubbles, which suggests centrifugal casting.  I suspect that point of damage/corrosion on your example's anchor is how the metal got in to the mold.

Here is the rim of the specimen I returned:

 (The bright line comes from my flashlight, there is nothing obviously wrong with it.)

Sometimes the coins will look legit because of legit corrosion, but this corrosion exists identically on their cast-mates.

The above illustration shows three coins, one from the bag (unknown weight), one from an online auction (not eBay), 3.49g, and one withdrawn from a different online auction (not eBay), 3.28g.

These fakes pass top dealers.  Be wary.  I returned my bag example for a full refund in January 2022.  It was then auctioned and hammered for $190.

This thread has reached six pages of replies yet no one has mentioned that just five years ago Leu was the victim of a massive Christmas Eve robbery.

586 lots from a closed auction were taken.  Some of the lots were group lots, thus the number of stolen coins was larger.

https://coinsweekly.com/leu-numismatik-ag-robbed-on-christmas-eve/

None of those lots ever reappeared on the market.

Are we sure it is a horse looking back?  Reminds me of centaur reverses from Magnetes in Thessaly.

I suspect many of these auction houses are self-insured.  It makes sense that they might want to figure out what happened — which might require asking awkward questions of consigners.  Similar to how detectives don’t release all information while they are investigating.

In 2002 a New York dealer was robbed of over a million dollars worth of coins and antiques.  The FBI solved it, and the thief is still in prison.  The coins were never recovered.  

I knew a little bit of the 2002 story but I learned more when I noticed an electrum stater from the robbery browsing the “sold coins” on the web site of an American dealer.  I thought perhaps I had found a clue that would lead back to the rest of the coins from the robbery.  I wrote to the victim.  I learned robbery coins have been noticed before.  The police and FBI are very involved with catching robbers but they don’t help with untangling how stolen goods wind up back on normal markets.  Auction houses don’t cooperate with private investigations, preferring to respect consigners’ privacy.  Lawsuits are required, and lawsuits are more expensive than electrum staters.

The coin trade involves a lot of personal trust.  Many dealers are self-insured.  It would be great if everyone worked together to figure out what happened.  At the end of the day the loser is not likely to be the criminal or an insurance company, but a small regional dealer.  It is easy for us, who don’t have our wallets on the line, to call for transparency.

13 hours ago, rNumis said:

Here's an idea. What if one were to create a web-searchable index of the older auction catalogs. You're not going to reproduce the lot descriptions or plate images, so maybe a way to avoid copyright issues. Maybe. 

@rNumis you already know this, but as background there are several very good web-searchable indexes of auction catalogs.

The American Numismatic Society has been cataloging its holdings for more than a century (since 1883!). They have 100,000+ books, periodicals, and catalogs.  Here is an example:

Leu Numismatik Auction 1, 10/25/2017, by by Leu Numismatik AG (Zuerich, Switzerland)

• Description: 221 p. : ill., col. pls., Bibl. ; 28 cm.
• Subject(s): Coins, Celtic | Coins, Ancient Greek | Coins, Medieval | Coins, Roman
• Summary: Includes celtic, greek, roman, byzantine and early medieval coins, and renaissance medals.
• https://donum.numismatics.org/cgi-bin/koha/opac-detail.pl?biblionumber=198475

rNumis calls this catalog LEUN_2017_10_25.  rNumis currently doesn't say much about this catalog because it is not online.  Note that rNumis knows the date.  The ANS library allows queries by date.  Four auctions occurred on November 25 2017.  @rNumis's programmers could easily query the ANS library for every rNumis ID, and link to either the ANS library URL or incorporate the summary into rNumis.

It would not be particularly difficult to set up a wiki, perhaps even using a free wiki like wikidot.com, with a page for either every catalog in rNumis or every catalog in the ANS library.  Perhaps most catalogs on the wiki would be ignored, but perhaps people who are interested in some catalogs might post useful things to the wiki.  Such as "I have an example for sale", "I found a copy on issue.com", or "the prices realized is online at https://..."

Large portions of the ANS library have been scanned, but because of copyright cannot be shared.  However, it is likely that there are people who can access the scans.  It seems likely that, if funding could be found, scanned catalogs could be OCRed and queried for rulers and locations, which could then be linked to the other ANS tools and to http://nomisma.org/ .  The ANS librarian only had the time to write "Includes celtic, greek, roman, byzantine and early medieval coins, and renaissance medals."  Perhaps a bot could count items of each category, provide breakdowns of the estimates, or counts of rulers and cities.  None of these things infringe today's copyright law.

People are already talking about what kind of law will apply to summaries created by AIs.  It might make sense to give the Wall Street Journal a cut of the money if a bot summarizes its front page.  It doesn't make sense to block a bot from summarizing the contents of a sales catalog from 1997.  Let's hope the law moves in the right direction.