JeandAcre

@Annes Kabel, it wouldn't surprise me for a minute if you were spot on! That's definitely in the same geographic range; as you probably know, various levels of Viking presence extended all the way across northern Poland. --I didn't even look at Dannenberg; dumbly, since he's still often more comprehensive than Kluge. Gotta make a beeline to the site that has it online! Many thanks for pointing this out!

Huge thanks, @Topcat7, @sand and, belatedly, @John Conduitt! ...Yikes, I didn't even notice that @John Conduitt had already included a link! Dope-Slapping Time.... @sand, I'm copying your instructions to put in a Google doc. Pretty sure I never got rid of Microsoft Paint. Might try out the keyboard keys, just to make sure they don't work in Windows 7. ...Honest, I need a whole new machine. Mostly just dreading having to export half a ton of stuff from this one.

This is going to verge on oxymoron. Right, a thoroughly secular ethnic Muslim, and an unapologetically observant Christian (starting with Corelli). Sorry for that. Well, sort of.... (Edit: Oh, No, the Coin. Aksum /Axum, 5th c. AE, gold inlay; one of the later ones to have consistently Greek legends. Munro-Hay 76; Hahn 283-320.) But Salman Rushdie's descriptions of his attack in upstate New York (shorter, then longer version: https://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-68739586 https://www.npr.org/2024/04/16/1244847366/salman-rushdie-knife) had to remind me of the avowed, crazy-off-his-meds racist from Indiana who 'wilded' me in the alley of my old apartment building. What had to resonate, besides the blood (and, mercifully, the immediate shock) was the eyeball that he left dangling out of the (new edit: Woops,) right socket. Witness what happened to Salman Rushdie's. ...You're welcome to infer what I ascribe this to, but at the ER, they were able to pop mine back in ...and it Still Works! Right, my own experience elicited this, otherwise frankly weird response. (Thank you, the Corelli.) Meanwhile, though, I'm very grateful that, for one, neither of us sustained brain damage. Salman Rushdie describes how his assailant didn't know what to do with a knife; mine didn't know how to kick someone's head in. (Edit:) Despite his Doc Martins.

Thanks All the way Back At you! :<} ...Hoping you get an honest minute to post more.

...As such, just intuitively, my best guess for the prototype would have to be an issue of Heinrich III (1039-1056). Replete with Viking 'peck marks' on the reverse. ...Yes, especially in reference to trade across the Baltic, peck marks extend from the high point of the raids, conquest and settlement in western Europe, well into the 11th century. An illuminating demonstration of how, even as the Scandinavians were beginning to settle down, increasingly emphasizing their ubiquitous genius for trade over their earlier, more dramatic pirsuits, they were still, well, culturally 'Vikings.' ...You get the same vibe from the Icelandic sagas (the earliest manuscripts of which only go back to the 13th century). --Thank you, on this level, the 'Vikings' took a Long Minute to stop being, well, 'Vikings.' ...How did modern Scandinavians end up being as chill as they are? The process goes back as far as this. ...All you have to do is to give equal weight to the cultural dynamics. Once you do that much, the Anglo-American stereotype of the 'Viking Age' summarily ending in 1066, with the Battle of Stamford Bridge, can be relegated to the comic books.

@Bonshaw, your point is very, very well taken. Right, I like a lot of Van Morrison, but my own Scots-Irish descent will always register with a measure of guilt. Kind of comes with the territory; if your apprehension of history is limited to the merely cerebral level, it's inherently inadequate. ...Nope, with several boatloads of English Puritans on my dad's side of the famiy, nothing's going to make me like Oliver Cromwell. As @kirispupis said (um, less than 24 hours ago), this level of historical resonance can extend as far as the First Jewish Revolt. ...I have to think that in both contexts, the consequences have continued to reverberate to the present day. But even independently of that, history really needs to register emotionally as well as cerebrally. (Edit 2:) Not necessarily by way of drastically altering one's (edit 1:) well, let's say, overtly political biases; more for the content to be more fully realized in one's own mind, on a much broader level.

@Salomons Cat and, to a lesser degree, @Roman Collector, what some of us here are getting at is that the locus is pretty emphatically not the coins themselves, but the widely varying, irreducibly subjective ways in which we relate to the attendant contexts. Yes, there can be a visceral dimension to this, but it has to do with our subsequent associations, rather than any innate 'karma' of the coin as an object. ...I guess you could apply that principle both to the historical context, and some particularly odious former owner. Granted, I've had the good fortune never to have had to deal with the latter case. ...At least to my knowledge (and if I'm wrong, I'm happy to stay so!) But if I did, the operative dynamic would still be associative, on my part, rather than anything relating to the coin itself. In effect, it would be my issue, not the coin's.

...Well, why not, one more repost. This is a trachy from Latin Constantinople. Annoyingly, it imitates a prototype of Manuel II which eludes capture on Wildwinds. But another example, only better, from CNG, is on Wildwinds, citing Sear 2022 and Dumbarton Oaks IV: 2. https://www.wildwinds.com/coins/byz/latin_rulers/t.html Regardless, the main selling point was the same; the remarkable state of the reverse legend. Yep, it's Manuel, alright.

...Still, @ela126, I'm rooting for your initial interpretation to be the right one. There's intuition, and then there's intuition based on a solid history of hands-on experience. The second kind inhabits a whole different sphere.

Yes, @Valentinian, that one isn't just exceptional; subjectively, it's sit-up-in-your-chair remarkable. ...Right, with anonymous folles, when you broach the subject of rarity, it's effectively reducible to a neat transference from the (right, common enough) issues generally, to the condition. Any of them as pristine as this are, ipso facto, rare. ...With apologies, this is yet another repost of my best example. (I should get points for having waited this long on this thread! :<} ) The preemptive selling point was how much of the obverse legend was intact. Basil II, Class 2.

Yowie, @Alegandron, if that isn't the best dirham of Saladin I've ever seen, it's time to enter an assisted living facility for dementia. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mDIG-RNwGeI

An amazing example, @lordmarcovan. It has to evoke John James Audubon's engraving of a bald eagle doing the same with a fish. https://www.audubon.org/birds-of-america/white-headed-eagle

Hi, Everybody, I Really Need Anything along these lines that works. Except that this now-antiquated desktop (first one I Ever bought new) is still loaded with Windows 7. Could anyone help with something that's compatible with that, but still available for download?

Well, @JAZ Numismatics, to be honest, that was a major factor in the erosion of my interest in Roman coins, especially as a collector. People have differing timelines, regarding the wider milieux that they're willing to put up with. Even though I'm still actively collecting medieval European (granted, less of that, even --but with retirement, other factors are in play), Edward I (thanks, @John Conduitt) remains deeply problemmatic. A couple of decades ago, when I stumbled onto well-documented descent from him, I needed a week or so to get through the initial phase of processing it. ...I'd've been happy to stop with Henry III. (Major patron of the arts; devoted family man; thoroughly incompetent politician. Aggregately, likeable on more levels than not.) What on earth led you to think that you were the initial culprit in this regard? No, I have to think that a reality check, regarding what's happening in real time, was precisely what was called for. Regarding that, a common pathology seems to be a moronically, but no less tragically ignorant coidentification of an entire ethnicity with a far more specific set of policies. ...Or other agendas, moral, cultural, etc. Smells very familiar, even from other contexts.

Wow, @kirispupis. The reference to your Ladino-speaking grandfather, and Spain, is a very sobering reminder of how, by way of euphemism, venerable the European tradition of anti-Semitism is. Even from here, it's effectively the least fun part of medieval history. ...And no one's exempt; cf., just for two, Edward I and Louis IX in the 13th century. ...For whatever it's worth, please be indulgent enough to receive my congratulations on you Sephardic descent! I have some residual Ashkenazi. But, we could just start with Spinoza. Oops, not to mention Maimonides. (I began life as a philosophy major.)

At the local coin shop where I grew up, I got one of these dirhams of Kaykhusraw II. Nearly half a century ago; ridiculously cheap, even with inflation and on my budget. Access kick-self mode: it's long gone. This is the nearest I can get these days. Mamluks (contemporaneously in Egypt and Syria, with expansion into the Frankish Levant). Baybars I, 658-676 AH /1260-1277 CE. AR dirham, also (with contemporary Seljuqs) following the module of Ayyubid issues. Album, 2nd ed. (1998), 883, noting that "[w]ell-struck examples of this [...] type are remarkably scarce." Most of them I've seen online don't have this much of the lion. ...Somewhere, in print (don't have the book), I read that, at least for the Mamluks, the lion was effectively a heraldic insignia for the dynasty.

@DonnaML, many thanks for the clarification, grim as it is. To come clean, I was mainly referencing a Jewish dealer, who sold lots of coins from the Maccabeans through the Second Revolt. Nope, regarding his clientele, I was making a frankly irresponsible assumption. ...I can't forget clerking at a local independent bookshop, that had an earlyish deluxe printing of Mein Kampf. There was this one guy for whom the price was beyond his immediate means. He was virtually salivating. It was quite the spectacle.

...Okay, okay, okay, Busted. --You're in the state, aren't you? Think I saw that in your profile, or somewhere. Yep, it was Spokane. Fondly known as 'Spokey the Town.' Who knows what, Exactly, the demographics look like now. But in the day, I liked to say, 'this isn't a city; it's a small town with too many people in it.' Home to a total of 4 1/2 Black people. ...They never found the other half.

@theotokevoithi, thanks for the link! Duly bookmarked. Granted, I don't have any Byzantine coins with this motif. But it gets echoed, near-contemporaneously, all the way over in Aragon, during the opening phases of the Reconquista. In this context, the usual interpretation is that this is a pairing of the cross with the 'Tree of Life.' I can only speculate whether there was any level of Byzantine inspiration or not. But as close as the chronology is, it's fun to think so. Sancho Ramirez,1063-1094. SAN.CIVS REX; Rev. ARAGON across the 'tree.' MEC v. 6, 47. Pedro I, 1094-1104 (featuring Pedro's 'man bun'). PETRUS REX; rev. as above. MEC v. 6, 49.

Intriguing, though, that in both your and @voulgaroktonou's examples, the controlling motif is an emperor, not Jesus or a saint. I wonder if people were doing this to emphasize political loyalties, along with religious adherence. ...Maybe that's not much of a leap.

@Broucheion and @John Conduitt, those have to evoke Jewish collectors of all kinds of Nazi memorabilia. You can't not admire the rationale; ensuring that this stuff remains in the historical record. And, that said, the sheer fortitude involved in pursuing it. But it's never stopped viscerally creeping me out. Once, during a mercifully brief period in a pointedly 'conservative' part of the West, I was browsing history in the main public library. There on a shelf was a tract for a notorious racist /neo-Nazi organization, known as (watch this:) the Church of Jesus Christ of Aryan Nations. (Should've prefaced that: 'Oxymoron Alert.') Familiar with the precedent of Jewish collectors, I initially took it home. But I ended up just not being able to live with it. Tore it up and tossed it. As MAD Magazine would say, Yecch.

The two motifs --crowned, facing portrait and some sort of building-- are definitely Salian; German / Holy Roman emperors 1024-1125. But the extreme blundering of the legends makes any more detailed attribution of the prototype a real project. ...Rats. I just tried a search through Kluge (Die Salier Deutsche Munzen, 1991), and couldn't find any close matches from the plates. On the brighter side, imitations of Salian coins are a known quantity. Maybe most conspicuously in Frisia; ranging as far as the eastern Baltic coast. Yes, notoriously with this level of legend blundering. For that matter, the same level of riffing could have happened with the motifs. That's what I have to think you've got. The imitations are effectively contemporaneous. Maybe only more emphatically than the ones from Frisia, those from the eastern Baltic may have had something to do with the Viking population. ...As such, they're Big Fun! Want to sell it? Message me, here! (Instant edit:) And a hearty welcome to the forum! From this website, the 'Message' icon is on the right side of the top of the page. I wish I could suggest an appropriate price. But I'm far from being fluent in the market for imitative examples like this. ...Really, they're just Fun. You'd be well advised to keep this!

...Rats, replete with links that were supposed to work (maybe on a less antiquated machine?), I still have trouble navigating the Dumbarton Oaks website. But more anecdotally, Wildwinds lists at least a couple of folles with facing portraits as early as as 541/2. Making the profile ones earlier than I, for one, was assuming they were. http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/byz/justinian_I/t.html

...Meanwhile, @Simon, when did Justinian's AEs transition from the profiles to the facing portraits? The shipping on cheaper copies of Sear scared me off (all from the UK), but it would be enlightening to find that out, relative to the reign. Granted, it was pretty eventful, up to the end. (Yike, just the war with the Sasanians, and the second major phase of the conquests in Italy and Visigothic Spain.)

@Simon, As a collector, I've never gotten a lot of traction with the earliest Byzantine AEs, with the (semantics alert:) late Roman profiles. As your example resonantly demonstrates, that's largely been a function of the examples I've (anecdotally) run into. Now, I'm starting to get it! You can really appreciate the ongoing transition, with the already distinctive lettering and the nuanced but noticeable variation in the portrait style. Thanks!