SimonW

8 hours ago, Severus Alexander said:

I think it went like this: Bidder 3 entered a prebid of 90 or 95. Prior to the sale, the only bid entered by Bidder 1 was a proxy bid of at least 120. That proxybid was initially triggered when the lot went on the block, at 100 to beat Bidder 3’s prebid. Then came your live bid, @ambr0zie, which triggered another increment on Bidder 1’s proxy. 

Almost. Not bidder 3's bid was at 95, but there were two proxy bids, one at 95 and one at or above 120. We'll have to make an update to the bid history to show outbid proxy bids that raised the bidding level.

As for the frozen screen, besides computer/browser problems, this can happen if your internet connection has a short hickup.

I've seen the Medallion in hand at Leu. An extremely impressive and highly intriguing piece. In the last Web Auction it sold for 8'500 CHF. The buyer must have got cold feet.

@DonnaML, he does provide a translation right after the Russian part.

I don't see anything wrong with either of the two coins. Both look perfectly fine and authentic. @Filat, what you are circling in blue are mostly shadows and in yellow some minor bumps and metal irregularities, which actually speak for the coins' authenticity and not against it.

4 hours ago, Kaleun96 said:

Vykingship. I've been using them for maybe 5 years at this point and can only say good things about them. Others may be cheaper, particularly since Vykingship is based in a state with sales tax (Minnesota), but their customer service, reliability, and speed has made me a loyal customer.  

I usually send cheap coins with their $13 "Asendia worldwide tracked" option or will consolidate a couple of expensive coins from different wins into a single FedEx package for $75 or so, which arrives in 2-3 days.

That's very helpful, thank you very much!

7 hours ago, Kaleun96 said:

In the past I had avoided them due to high shipping fees and difficult customer service but now that I have my coins shipped to a shipping forwarder, taking advantage of HA's $13 domestic shipping rates, I can then send them on to Sweden much more cheaply.

What shipping forwarder do you use?

Congratulations on a great year, @AncientJoe! All wonderful coins. Here are a few more pedigrees in case you are not aware of them already.

Your Maximianus Aureus is ex NGSA, Auction 13, Lot 13 (2021); Roma, Auction XX, Lot 681 (Long Valley River Collection, 2020); NAC, Auction 105, Lot 108 (2018); Gemini, Auction III, Lot 450 (2007). It's also supposedly (I didn't check) ex Tkalec, Auction 25 October 1996, Lot 264; Leu, Auction 65, Lot 480 (1996) and published in X. Calicó, Los Aureos Romanos (2002). NAC says it's also ex Leu, Auction 93, Lot 121 (Claude Vaudecrane Collection ["a perfectionist"], 2005) which, however, is wrong. Roma and NGSA copied the mistake.

And your Nero is ex Künker, Auction 117, Lot 5040 (2006). Not very important since you found the Hirsch and Ball pedigrees, but just in case you want to have your records as complete as possible.

I particularly like your Maximianus Aureus. One of my favorite coins is from the same series.

Very glad to hear the new treatment is going well, @Severus Alexander! I wish you all the best for 2023 and hope that your coin year 2022 was just as successful as your 2021 🙂 

I most like your Caesar Denarius, your Stratonikaia AE with the erased Geta portrait and your new style Tetradrachm with the small Pegasos on the reverse.

14 hours ago, Limes said:

Nice, interested to see the photos! And could you provide some info on the cleaning job? I have a coin with lovely surfaces but also some hard dirt on it which requires tools other then the wooden toothpick, and I would like to have cleaned. But I do not dare to do it myself! 

Here is a picture taken with my smartphone (until I have better pictures). I had it cleaned by a professional in Germany. I usually send in half a dozen of coins and get them back after a month or two and get charged by hour. The last batch of 9 or 10 coins (including the Rhino) took them 11 hours to clean.

5 hours ago, Severus Alexander said:

I'm glad you had a stellar year despite the heavy competition!  Like many others here I love the rhino of course – looking forward to that new photo! – and wow, what a provenance on the Titus!  (Great coin too, excellent Minerva.)  Like @Sulla80 I wondered about the cornucopia/scales combo, I'm not sure I've seen that motif before. (Happy New Year to you too! 🙂) Great find on the wolf with cave, I hope you managed to snag that for a bargain because nobody else realized what it was.

Thank you very much, @Severus Alexander! 🙂 The wolf with cave was indeed a bargain (at least IMO) as I was ready to bid quite a lot more for this rare piece. Van Heesch records two pieces in Vatican (#37 & 38) with Tiber left (another variation of this rare series), but none with Tiber right. Mine seems to be completely unrecorded.

5 hours ago, Severus Alexander said:

My favourite, though, is the Mercury/rooster.  I'm wondering... might Mercury have the features of a young Marcus Aurelius?

Yes, absolutely. By now I believe that all the anonymous fractions of that series were produced under A. Pius as many of the male gods (Jupiter, Tiber, Mars, Neptune) not infrequently bear the facial features of A. Pius. Mercury does indeed on many coins look like the young Marcus Aurelius. On one particular coin, Mercury looks just like Hadrian. I think it's very probably that they were minted in the first 10 or so years of A. Pius' reign.

Of course there's other evidence like the wolf in cave that first appeared on coins of A. Pius or the legend TEMPORVM FELICITAS that first appeared under A. Pius and is related to the four seasons Quadrantes.

Thank you everyone for the nice comments 🙂 

On 12/28/2022 at 1:42 PM, Sulla80 said:

the Hadrian with scales on cornucopia I find particularly interesting - how would this have been read by an ancient recipient?  Aequitas? just distribution of abundance?

That's a good question. Both the cornucopiae and the scales are typical attributes for Aequitas and Moneta. I would probably interpret it as something like "abundance/wealth to everyone", which makes a great New Year's wish. In that spirit, I wish everyone a prosperous New Year.

On 12/29/2022 at 11:10 AM, Limes said:

Very interesting collecting theme, and some great additions, congratulations. Personally, I like the Domitian quadrans most. The Künker photo's don't do it justice, I imagine, it must a great piece in hand. 

The picture of the coin is quite accurate, I'd say. However, I had it cleaned in the meantime and all the minor encrustations are now gone 🙂 I'll share a new picture as soon as I have it photographed.

On 12/28/2022 at 2:31 PM, Jeremy said:

I was wondering who bought the Zeus Ammon tessera - it's an amazing piece! Have you been able to find any references for your tessera, or deduce what the winged object is? Mine seems to be unpublished and I'm curious if that's the case for yours as well.

Thank you, @Jeremy! I haven't found anything that is remotely similar until now. I assume it's unpublished as well.

My vote goes to the super detailed and beautiful VRBS ROMA 🙂 All others are great, too!

Great selection, @Jeremy! I like all your coins, but one particularly stands out to me: the Antinoüs Tessera! 😍 I bought the second big lead Tessera they offered in this auction:

2022 has been an unexpected successful year in terms of finding new coins for my fractions collection. Although competition was extremely strong on many of the coins I've bought, I am very happy with every single coin a did manage to buy.

Here are my top 10. Although some are not particularly beautiful to look at, their rarity more than makes up for it.

Titus, Quadrans (15 mm, 2.96 g), Rome, 80-81 AD.
Obv. IMP T VESP AVG COS VIII, head of Minerva, helmeted, r. Rev. S C, within laurel-wreath. RIC 254 (C).
Ex Münzhandlung Basel, Auction 1 (28.06.1934), Lot 445; Collection of Christian August, Prince of Waldeck and Pyrmont (1744-1798).

Domitianus, Quadrans (18 mm, 2.81 g), Rome, 84-85 AD.
Obv. Rhinoceros stg. l. Rev. IMP DOMIT AVG GERM (starts low l.), surrounding large S C. RIC 250 (C).
Ex Salton Collection.
Very rare in this condition.

Traianus, Semis (18 mm, 2.90 g), Rome, 107-109 AD.
Obv. IMP CAES NERVA TRAIAN AVG GER DAC, bust of Traianus, laureate, r., draped left shoulder. Rev. S C (ex.), table decorated with panels and gryphons bearing a smaller wreath left, a vase with palm in the middle and a bigger wreath right. Woytek 596b-1 (RIC 688).
Ex Salton Collection.
Extremely rare with two wreaths.

Hadrianus, Semis (19 mm, 3.74 g), Rome, 119-123 AD.
Obv. IMP CAESAR TRAIAN HADRIANVS AVG, head of Hadrianus, laureate, r. Rev. P M TR P COS III / S – C, scales balanced on cornucopia. RIC 629 (C).
Ex Salton Collection.

Antoninus Pius, Semis or offstrike (20 mm, 5.36 g), Rome, 139 AD.
Obv. ANTONINVS AVG PIVS P P, bare head of Antoninus Pius r. Rev. TR POT COS II, modius with two corn ears and poppy. RIC -, cf. 58 (denarius).

Anonymous, Quadrans (16 mm, 2.57 g), Rome, 81-161 AD.
Obv. Bust of Tiber, crowned with reeds, bearded, r.. Rev. S C (ex.), she-wolf and twins r. in cave. RIC 17 (R) var. (no cave).
Apparently unpublished.

Anonymous, Quadrans (15 mm, 3.03 g), Rome, 81-161 AD.
Obv. Head of Tiber, crowned with reeds, bearded, l. Rev. S C (ex.), she-wolf and twins r. RIC 18 (R).
Ex Salton Collection; Ars Classica, Auction 13 (27.06.1928), Lot 1547; Allatini Collection.
Extremely rare with Tiber left.

Anonymous, Quadrans (15 mm, 2.78 g), Rome, 81-161 AD.
Obv. Bust of Mercury, draped, wearing winged petasus, r., caduceus behind. Rev. S – C, rooster r. RIC 29 (C).
Despite RIC rating this as "common", this is an extremely rare type.

Anonymous, Tessera (13 mm, 0.48 g), Moesia Inferior, Nicopolis ad Istrum (?), 3rd-4th century AD.
Obv. Bust of Athena, draped, helmeted, r.. Rev. Crescent and three stars. HrHJ (2021) 8.0.48.8.

Anonymous, Tessera (20 mm, 1.24 g), Asia Minor, uncertain, 3rd-4th century AD (?).
Obv. Julian-Claudian head, laureate, left (Tiberius?); left, crayfish (?); right, dolphin. Rev. Blank.

I hope at least some of you find these as interesting as I do 🙃 and look forward to get to know your favorites.

On 12/14/2022 at 4:51 PM, Finn235 said:

The "four seasons" quadrans series is somewhat controversial, with some claiming the young boy is a representation of Commodus' younger brother Annius Verus, and others maintaining that he is nothing more than an allegory, and possibly that the coins were minted as early as the time of Trajan or Hadrian. Regardless, this "Winter" quadrans is quite rare and I am thrilled to have it, whether it represents Annius Verus or not.

Not as controversial as you think. It's widely accepted today that the four different types represent the four seasons rather than Annius Verus. Van Heesch conclusively refuted Cohen's thesis that this was Annius Verus in his article "UNE REPRÉSENTATION REMARQUABLE DES QUATRE SAISONS SUR SEMISSES DE L'ÉPOQUE ANTONINIENNE" (translated from French to English):

It is unlikely to be Annius Verus. There is not only a resemblance with this prince but the portraits can also be compared with those appearing on some aurei of Antoninus Pius and with the heads of Commodus caesar, Galerius Antoninus, Geta etc. All these heads of young boys are very similar. Moreover, semisses and quadrantes were no longer issued during the reign of Marcus Aurelius.

Your piece is particularly interesting because it combines the obverse of the winter type (veiled head, crowned with reeds) with the reverse of the spring type (wreath of flowers). There are only very few pieces where the obverses and reverses have been incorrectly combined.

Edit:

I think that the four seasons Quadrantes were issued under A. Pius (like possibly all anonymous Quadrantes), the first emperor issuing coins with the legend TEMPORVM FELICITAS and showing the same youthful heads of two boys on two crossed cornucopiae:

Commodus later adopted the same legend on a medallion depicting all four seasons in the same image for the first time on a coin:

Just recently discovered another old provenance. Not as impressive as the d'Este/Gonzaga provenance, but still very nice:

Titus, Quadrans (15 mm, 2.96 g), Rome, 80-81 AD.
Obv. IMP T VESP AVG COS VIII, head of Minerva, helmeted, r. Rev. S C, within laurel-wreath. RIC 254 (C).

Provenance

• Dr. Busso Peus Nachfolger, Auction 433 (01.11.2022), Lot 1479
• Münzhandlung Basel, Auction 1 (28.06.1934), Lot 445
• Collection of Christian August, Prince of Waldeck and Pyrmont (1744-1798)

8 hours ago, Deinomenid said:

TimeLine owns Wildwinds.

I thought Dane Kurth (also known from Helvetica's RIC lists) owned it, but I think you are right. According to Timeline's website ("About us"), it belongs to Timeline and Dane is curating it.

37 minutes ago, Roman Collector said:

I wonder if there's a way to notify the buyer.

Not directly. You would have to contact Timeline about this.

23 minutes ago, ambr0zie said:

Every time I see a similar subject I wonder if I have similar examples in my collection.

We probably all have. There are lots of old casts that are much more dangerous than this modern one.

27 minutes ago, Roman Collector said:

Some poor soul got taken for a couple hundred bucks. I noted the coin was a fake in the comments section about the coin at acsearchinfo. I wonder if @SimonW knows of any legal recourse for this collector.

Since this is clearly a cast forgery, the buyer shouldn't have any difficulties returning it to the auction house and getting a full refund.

I was lucky enough to find one of them for my fractions collection last year 🙂 

Nerva, Quadrans (15 mm, 2.54 g), Rome, 96-98 AD.
Obv. IMP NERVA CAES AVG, modius, 2 corn ears. Rev. S – C, winged caduceus. RIC 109 (C). D'Este countermark on obverse (left field) inlayed in silver.

1 hour ago, The_Collector said:

any recommendations on how to pay and avoid heavy transaction fees?

I recommend wise.com. No transaction fees and best exchange rate.

Well in that case I'd simply use a list of names of the kings, magistrates and/or issuers that are of interest. For example:

Alexandria Troas (Lysimachus Antiochus)

Or if you are interested in certain denominations (e.g. Tetradrachms), add those too. If your looking for bronze, use "AE" (including the quotation marks). This all helps to narrow down your search. Once you get used to the search syntax, it's quite easy to get exactly what you're looking for 😉

Nonetheless, thank you very much for your inputs. The features you suggested would certainly be nice to have and I'll see what I can do.

42 minutes ago, kirispupis said:

(no offense)

None taken 🙂 

42 minutes ago, kirispupis said:

Two recent examples are "Alexandria Troas" and "Ilion".

If you only care about the greek coins and not about the roman provincial issues, use the following search term:

Alexandria Troas ("bc" "b.c." "bce" "b.c.e." "v. chr." "avant j." "a.c." "ac") -(colon pseudo autonom "ad" "a.d." "n. chr.")

Use the city name you are interested in and add two search groups, one positive, one negative. The positive group contains all terms of which at least one should be present in a result. The negative group contains all words that must not be present in a result (all of them would be associated with roman provincial coins). Use quotation marks where you want to have an exact match and no quotation marks when the term is either unique or may continue (the wildcard is added to all terms that aren't in quotation marks by default). Your results may still contain a few provincial issues, but most will be greek coins.

Here are the results:

Alexandria Troas (2168 results)
Alexandria Troas ("bc" "b.c." "bce" "b.c.e." "v. chr." "avant j." "a.c." "ac") -(colon pseudo autonom "ad" "a.d." "n. chr.") (313 results)

Please correct me if I am wrong, but if you use regular expressions to get data to train an ML/AI model, the model will only (or mainly) work for records that follow the same regular expressions. Amazon had that exact problem with their facial detection app where they used mainly faces of white people to train the model. The model then, unsurprisingly, only worked well for white people.

I would use a pre-trained model (e.g. GPT-3) on a few thousand random records, verify/correct them manually and then train a custom model.

More difficult than extracting the data is normalizing it (differnet languages, spelling, notation, etc.) so that it becomes usefull.

11 hours ago, Ed Snible said:

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.

Thank you very much @Ed Snible for providing your regular expressions. The problem is that I don't have time to write individual regular expressions for each company, language and numismatic area, which would take weeks and weeks of work alone. I would need one (or no more than a few) that is robust enough to cover at least 95% of all 10 million records. A well trained ML/AI model would most probably be more effective and robust.