Ed Snible

Kushan coins have a lot of different deities. Yours names the goddes perfectly. There is a nice chart at http://coinindia.com/galleries-huvishka.html which should help you.

There are a few other possibilities. Apologies for the poor state of this coin. I'd like to blame my photography, but the coin is probably worse than the photo: Eleusis, 3rd cent BC, AE15, 3.1g Obv: Triptolemos in chariot drawn by serpents left. Rev: ELEY; Pig on mystic staff, all in wreath. (Note: Coinage of the Eleusinian festival) Wikipedia: "... initiates had a special drink (kykeon), of barley and pennyroyal, which has led to speculation about its chemicals perhaps having psychotropic effects from ergot (a fungus that grows on barley, containing psychedelic alkaloids similar to LSD). ... Ergot fragments were found inside a vase and within the dental calculus of a 25-year-old man, providing evidence of ergot being consumed (Juan-Stresserras, 2002). This finding seems to support the hypothesis of ergot as an ingredient of the Eleusinian kykeon." This is pure speculation on my part ... but the coin depicts a dude named "Trip" in a flying chair. It also depicts a pig, a kind of animal famous for mushroom hunting. Here is another miserable coin: (Probably you should avert your eyes from the coin below and look at a nicer one in the BCD auction.) Arkadia, Tegea 4.71g AE23 "bronze hemiobol" 50-25 BC Rev: On the left, Kepheos, nude but for helmet, holding spear and shield in his left hand and extending his right towards Athena, on the right, standing left, holding spear in her left hand and lock of the Medusa’s hair in her right; between them, Sterope standing right, holding vessel to receive the lock; above and below, monogram. Bought from ECIN Associates with an ticket dated January 2002 offering it for 100 Swiss Francs saying it was found at a Heraclean temple about 1km east of ancient Cleonae and another ticket offering it at $350 saying it is ex BC... (but it doesn't match the three specimens in the BCD sale) What was really in the vessel said to contain Medusa's hair? Adrienne Mayor says poison. I mention this because there is a story that the the blood of Medusa contained a drug. "As a surgeon Asklepios became so skilled in his profession that he not only saved lives but even revived the dead; for he had received from Athene the blood that had coursed through the Gorgo's veins, the left-side portion of which he used to destroy people, but that on the right he used for their preservation, which is how he could revive those who had died." At Tegea, which made this coin, they had a legend that Sterope, the daughter of Cepheus, used this jar as a protection. "The sight of it would put the enemy to fight." It seems very strange to me, and could be a drug as easily as poison.

A French Art Deco medal by Raymond Delamarre: France, after 1925. Delamarre, Raymond (1890–1986), French Mint Perseus and Andromeda Octagonal. 76mm approx 220g. There was a similar edition of 10 in 1925. The French Mint apparently first issued in 1931, this is the circa 1950 restrike, or at least I think so. Maybe they are still making them? There used to be an amazing little gallery/museum on 38th street in Manhattan that sold contemporary medals and had exhibits of historical medals of the 1800s and 1900s. It closed last year. If it hadn't been for that place I would not have been able to learn about medals. They don't show up at art galleries or coin shows.

I was the under-bidder. I was already watching the lot. If the transaction is smooth, the buyer got a bargain. The coin was offered on eBay by someone with 185 feedback, mostly for non-coin items. The coin was described as "Drachm" and "NGC Fine" when it was a tetradrachm and NGC AU.

Here is one that I can identify: MYSIA, Parion, Severus Alexander (AD 222-235), AE 22, 5.85g Obv: IMP CAES L SEP SEV ALEXANDER (Ss retrograde); Laureate and cuirassed bust right Rev: C G I H / PAR (abbreviation for Colonia Gemella Julia Hadriana Pariana) Ref: RPC VI 3876 Here is one I can't identify: Helena imitative AE 8mm 0.50g Obv: Helena (The portrait could also be Fausta.) Rev: Wolf and twins

I’m not trying to offer a commercial solution. My hope is to inspire a student or independent scholar to do the work. Once the work is done, there is perhaps a nice paper to publish in a journal for the student. “Extracting metadata from sales catalogs in the antiquities trade” or some such. To get a well trained AI model some training data is needed. Tens of thousands of examples where the correct answer is known. I’m describing an approach to get that training data. Here is the approach I recommend. First, obtain data. The easiest way to accept @SimonW’s offer of 1% of the auction descriptions. That would currently be 101,288 descriptions. Next, manually come up with a “regular expression” to match the data you want in the first record. Say dates. For example, the first record for "Hadrian" in ACSearch is Hadrian AR Denarius. Rome, AD 132-134. HADRIANVS AVGVSTVS, bare head left / INDVLGENTIA AVG PP COS III, Indulgentia seated left, extending right hand and holding sceptre. RIC 213; C. 846, 850. 3.20g, 18mm, 6h. Very Fine. The pattern is very simple: “a ruler name, a metal, a denomination, a period, a city, AD, a year, a dash, another year.” Perhaps 1% of the data in ACSearch follows that pattern. Find the records that match the pattern. Remove those records. Repeat until there are just a thousand oddball records left. I found the records that didn’t match the most common patterns were usually typos. My claim is that with a few days of work it is possible to create regular expression patterns to match 90% of the metadata in sales catalogs. ACSearch has over ten million records, so that would be correct metadata for 9 million of them. Correct metadata for 9 million coins would be valuable! It is easy to get to 95% with a bit more work. Not just the years and rulers, but the inscriptions, grades, weights, and catalog references. The same patterns can be applied to the OCRed text from early catalogs available from archive.org (@rNumis does this interest you?). Six years ago Alfred De La Fe and I could not find anyone else interested in this effort. This approach is only useful if the result can sold or given to someone who already has an ancient coin search engine, or for generating data to train an AI, or for an academic paper. Perhaps today there are more people who can use the output, and more people skilled in creating regular expression matchers?

I use it because I cut and paste from the auction description. Some of my coins have dates of the form "av. J.-C." and others "Jhdt. v. Chr." I am a big fan of dates that use negative numbers, like the range -37 - 8 for king Polomo I. I am not a big fan of dates in 100-units, such as "early forth century".

Back in 2016 I was volunteering for coinproject.com by writing a program that could read freeform auction record text from JSON files and understand it enough to create the kinds of metadata records CoinProject was using for its search feature. It was able to get about 98% understanding of the coin descriptions by applying "regular expressions" to human text written by the catalogers at Gitbud and Solidus. For example, for Roman Imperial I was getting the emperor and his reign using this: '^(?P<issuer>[A-Z][a-z]+ [A-Z][a-z]+) \((?P<daterange>[0-9]+-[0-9]+)\)\.', # Emp Emp (123-456) '^(?P<issuer>[A-Z][a-z]+ [A-Za-z]+)\. \((?P<daterange>[0-9]+-[0-9]+) ?\)\.', # Emp. (123-456 ) '^(?P<issuer>[A-Z]+) \((?P<daterange>[0-9]+ BC-AD [0-9]+)\)\.', # EMP (123 BC-AD 456) '^[A-Z ]+\. Minted under (?P<issuer>[A-Z ]+) \((?P<daterange>[0-9]+-[0-9]+)\)\.', # EMP. Minted under EMP (123-456). '^(?P<issuer>[A-Z ]+) \((?P<daterange>[0-9]+-[0-9]+ AD)\)\.', # EMP (123-456 AD). '^(?P<issuer>[A-Z ]+) \((?P<daterange>[0-9]+)\)\.', # EMP (123). '^(?P<issuer>[A-Z ]+) \(Died (?P<daterange>[0-9]+)\)\.', # EMP (Died 123). '^(?P<issuer>[A-Z ]+)\. \(Died (?P<daterange>[0-9]+)\)\.', # EMP. (Died 123). '^(?P<issuer>[A-Z ]+) \(Died AD (?P<daterange>[0-9]+)\)\.', # EMP (Died AD 123). '^(?P<issuer>[A-Z ]+) \(AD (?P<daterange>[0-9]+[ \?]?- ?[0-9]+)\)\.', # EMP (AD 123-456). '^[A-Z ]+: (?P<issuer>[A-Z ]+) \((?P<daterange>[0-9]+-[0-9]+) AD\)\.', # EMP: EMP (123-456 AD). '^(?P<issuer>[A-Z ]+)\. Wife of [A-Z][a-z]+\. \((?P<daterange>[0-9]+-[0-9]+)\)\.', # EMP. Wife of EMP. (123-456). '^[A-Z ]+\([0-9]+-[0-9]+\)\. Minted under (?P<issuer>[A-Z ]+) \((?P<daterange>[0-9]+-[0-9]+)\)\.', # EMP (123-456). Minted under EMP (123-456). I had other patterns to extract Greek cities, denominations, and issue years. Most of the time was figuring out the other 2%. Today I would just focus on the 98% I understood, and perhaps later use the programmatically extracted data to train an AI to guess at the others. It was boring working on this all by myself so I gave up. Perhaps today there is a large enough community of people who like both computers and coins that more progress could be made, with the work spread over more people?

When I signed up for acsearch, more than 10 years ago, I clicked to agree to the terms. I assume the terms I agreed to then are similar to the current terms, which say "2.1 Any intervention in the function or manipulation of the website is forbidden to the highest degree. This in particular includes ... the use of so called web scrapers, web robots and other software for the systematic collection of data and content ..." Without the data it is hard to create and test software to analyze the data! I have never asked Simon Wieland for permission to access his data. I don't have time to work on this project seriously. Perhaps someone could approach him to see if he would be willing to sell programmatic access to his non-price data to companies and non-profits doing research and new product design.

My Cederlind catalogs start in 1994. The ANS library in Manhattan has a copy of that catalog, in the open stacks. https://donum.numismatics.org/cgi-bin/koha/opac-detail.pl?biblionumber=191411 I have several coins that appeared in CNG auctions that aren't in their archives. CNG has a policy of removing unsolds. Those unsolds get sold to dealers, and then I buy them, and fail to verify the provenance online. Luckily PDFs are available of the printed catalogs, but unsolds from CNG e-auctions are not available from CNG. The technology for doing word searches of the catalogs is known. I know the Internet Archive applies OCR to everything. That gets better every year, and allows full text searching. (OCR of coin catalogs is a bit weak because most OCR programs expect monolingual text, not a mixture of English and Greek capitals.). The problems are related to copyright and business models. There are a lot of up-front costs related to scanning and writing software. Someone with a better idea has to re-do all of the work already done by many other firms before they can start working on new ideas.

(posted multiple times in error)

(posted multiple times in error)

I have never tried ACSearch's image search. I would be happy to read an article or write-up about the experience, if anyone has tried it. I have never seen a biddr auction go away. My fear is that all of the archived data on biddr could go away, within the span of a few seconds, without warning. I purchased coins on pecunum.com between 2013-2016. That entire trove of data is gone. (It was a major site, operated by A. J. Gatlin of CoinArchives fame. I do not know if anyone purchased the rights to the archives of the company.) With Biddr, some auctions (e.g. this one) have a link to download a PDF catalog. (Many do not, but perhaps the browser could generate PDFs of each page of 100 lots.). An archive of those catalogs would have a value of $0 as long as Biddr operates, but if Biddr ever goes away it could become important. Of course, not every auction is on biddr. Frank Robinson's catalogs go away when the next auction is loaded. If someone sold me a coin and said it was ex-Frank Robinson Auction 80, it would be hard to verify even with the printed black and white catalogs.

I'd like to see the creation of a digital library of coin auctions. Even if I had no access to it. @kirispupis asks for automatic detection of duplicates, and die duplicates, which is a major unsolved research problem and depends on the existence of a database of auctions -- a database that doesn't exist. That database may never exist if we don't build it now. I recently acquired a small cache of Tom Cederlind catalogs. Digital versions used to be available online, but no longer exist. Oh how I wish I had saved them! Not only are the digital versions of Cederlind's catalogs unavailable, the print versions are unobtainable -- they are not old/rare enough to be of value to the kinds of people who buy 1920s catalogs from Kolbe, Fanning, and Davis, so they never show up in book auctions. Many firms host a few auctions on biddr.com, sometimes with a PDF catalog, sometimes without, then vanish leaving no trace of the thousands of coins they sold. Once those catalogs are gone it will be more difficult to reconstruct hoards. There may also be difficulties importing coins in the future without these records. It would be easy now for an individual to download PDF catalogs from dealer sites, and to "print as PDF" or save in a database the coins appearing on VCoins and eBay. Yet as far as I know no one is doing that. (Perhaps some folks are doing that but can't discuss it because of copyright reasons?). The technical work isn't hard -- a script could do it -- but it is boring.

I found https://hcommons.social/ (currently not accepting new members; "supporting scholars and practitioners across the humanities and around the world.") and https://archaeo.social/ ("for archaeologists, historians and lovers of all things ancient."). Pick your site wisely; if you decide to start over on a new server your posts and followers don't come with you.

Read the survey. The @mordehaus is asking people about organizing their collection database, their sales paperwork, and tracking auctions. From these questions we can speculate. Consolidator sites like NumisBids.com and Sixbid.com (for coins), and BookFinder.com (for books) allow me to search the inventory of many online stores. It saves a lot of time vs searching many auction house web sites. Many online stores allow me to view my past purchases. Usually they show me my purchases chronologically by purchase date. Some don’t remember what I have bought. One, eBay, throws away the details after 90 days. However, I rarely want to look at my coins sorted by house and purchase date. It would be nice if a single site gathered up all of my invoices and auction text and converted it into a personal database or wiki. I probably wouldn’t use it; I have a manual system that doesn’t require much effort. However, I lost a lost of paperwork related to my first few years go collecting before I figured out my current system.

zirk.us advertises itself as being oriented to "Literature, philosophy, film, music, culture, politics, history, architecture: join the circus of the arts and humanities! For readers, writers, academics or anyone wanting to follow the conversation." As far as I can tell, no one on Mastodon is using the #numismatics tag, and there is very little for archaeology and ancient history. I see a few people using #rome, mostly about the city.

There are many different rulers. Sumatra, Aceh, 0.60g, 1/4 mas dinar, 12mm Sultan Aladdin Mansur Shah, 1579-1586 Obv: Ala ad Din ibn Ahmad Rev: Al Sultan Al Adil Ref: Netherlands East Indies / Atjeh / Km1?; Zeno 21842 This mas dinar is attributed to Sultan Aladdin Mansur Shah (1579-1586AD), a prince from Sultan Ahmad of Perak (Malaysia) Sultan Hussein (alias Ali Riayat Shah) of Aceh invaded Perak in year 1573. All the royal family of Perak was brought to Aceh and Perak became a regent to the Aceh Sultanate. After the death of Sultan Hussein, he left no prince to succeed over the kingdom causing a power struggle. Prince Mansur of Perak was then chosen in 1579 to take over in Aceh as Sultan Aladdin Mansur Shah. However he was not popular to the local Aceh due to being a foreigner, and was killed in 1586 on his way to Perak to install his brother as the sultan of Perak.

@NewStyleKing I speculate that the "Caps of the Dioscouri" type also relates to Mithradates. He used it on his own coins, e.g. https://www.biddr.com/auctions/romanumismatics/browse?a=707&l=746978 . I also believe the "Caps of the Dioscouri" don't represent the caps of Castor and Pollux, but instead represent the two comets of Mithradates, the same two comets on his horsehead types, e.g. https://coinweek.com/ancient-coins/the-ancient-coins-of-mithridates/ .

@NewStyleKing thanks for this table. For the gorgon head, you have 99/8 BC. CNG is using 97/6 BC. I have seen other auction houses saying 98/7 BC. Why the discrepancy? I have been using 98/7 BC for the gorgon head. I know the amphora letters are the lunar months. Is it reasonable to use http://astropixels.com/ephemeris/phasescat/phases-0099.html to convert the Attic months into our system? So a gorgon head of month M (Skirophorion) would be June 13 - July 13, 97 BC (assuming the dating is 98/7 BC), or June 23 - July 23, 98 BC (assuming the dating is 99/8 BC)?

@KyNumis @NewStyleKing What does the MH below the owl represent?

What about this? https://www.vcoins.com/en/stores/the_ibarra_collection/304/product/brutus_fourree_denarius_42_bc_military_mint_traveling_with_brutus_and_cassius_in_southwestern_asian_minor/1713747/Default.aspx

eBay used to have an "Items Wanted" section, for humans to find things requested. They no longer have it. eBay supposedly took it down because they were being cut out of the transactions, but I never got replies for my requests except spam. eBay still has automated searches. Forum has a "Personal Want Lists" section, https://www.forumancientcoins.com/board/index.php?board=13.0 . It does not get much traffic. VCoins has a "Want List" feature. I use this a lot! My only complaint is that I can't make it run more frequently than once a day. Often I get an email that something I want has been listed, but it sold 20 hours ago. Several dealers and auction sites have similar features.

@NewStyleKing, I appreciate you writing up your findings (such as "The Odyssey of the Poggio Picenze Hoard IGCH 2056") and publishing them on Academia. I wish more people would do that.

How should dealers and collectors ensure provenance is transmitted to future scholars? How should museums? When I read 19th century numismatic journals, the provenance is usually given as "My Collection", "Commerce". Occasional there is a more serious provenance such as "found in a graveyard in Etruria" or "purchased with four coins of Crete at Smyrna by Major Cunningham in 1888" but this is rare. @NewStyleKing, what steps are you taking to ensure your own collection's provenance is not lost? If I believe the dealer is open, I ask for the provenance. Sometimes I get a provenance such as "This was part of a group lot in Steve Album's auction 100" or "Aaron bought it at Numismata in Munich last year". Sometimes, when I see a large number of coins on the market of a previously rare type, I ask for the nationality of the consigner, but rarely get even this information. I try to hang out on social media in places where such matters are discussed. All of my coins are in flips, and all of my flips have a hidden area where I record the dealer, price, and date of purchase. This keeps the information with the coin. In case the flips are discarded I have a printed inventory of my collection. My hope is that if I get hit by a bus this printed inventory is donated to the ANS archives. However, I haven't taken serious steps like actually writing "please donate this printed archive to the ANS" on that inventory and putting it in a safety deposit box. I remember once seeing a very nice group lot of bronze coins of Amisos in a Triton auction. All of them had provenances, and CNG told me that the consigner insisted that the provenances be part of the lot. I was outbid on this group lot, but acquired one of the coins three months later. The reseller did not have those provenances any longer. Many dealers don't believe such information has economic value. I don't know if it was Mark Salton's responsibility to get the 1961 provenance to you. He worked really hard on his world coin archive manuscript. There aren't enough hours to preserve everything, especially in 1961, before the Internet, and before photocopiers were widely available. What steps do you think Margaret Thompson should have taken? Should she have insisted on publishing the name of the dealer used by the Saltons? Should she have kept that information privately with her research materials? Should she have put that information in "escrow" to be released at a future time? Have you written to the ANS to see if they have any archives about Margaret Thompson? I have no idea what she saved. You might want to come to New York and look through everything they have. It is possible she had notes on New Style hoards she never published. What are you doing to ensure your own unpublished research materials are preserved?