Ocatarinetabellatchitchix

Hello my young Italian friend. This is a very interesting discovery; even the famous Gallienus’ collector Frank Reinhardt didn’t have one in his collection ! Please take a look here: https://www.academia.edu/71026138/GALLI

Hello Simon. We have a member here on NF who is a professional numismatic photographer: @HipShot Photography Maybe he’ll be willing to share some tricks if you PM him. He also has a nice website. https://hipshotphotography.com

Thanks for sharing. I like the Vulcan’s head with his cap on the top of the furnace. I’m wondering if the cupids are heating the ingots or the flans ???

What do we know about the location of the ancient monetary workshops ? Almost nothing is known about the head of the workshop or his staff in Greece. A letter from Demetrios, in charge at Alexandria under Ptolemy II, shows him waiting in 258 BC a decision of the diocete Apollonius, his minister of finance (P. Cairo Zen. 59021). In Athens, we know from Nicophon's law that the workers were public slaves while another inscription tells us that Lysias was physetes, literally "blower", at the mint (J. R. Melville Jones, 1993 , no. 516). Of the approximately 1,000 cities in the classical Greek world, around 400 minted money but only a few dozen did so on a regular and prolonged basis. Episodic most of the time, the issuance of coins did not necessarily require the allocation of a building of its own, even less of a prestigious building as would be the case later and up to the present day. Also and quite logically, archeology has only rarely identified traces of ancient monetary workshops. Among the most convincing cases is that of Athens for which American excavators uncovered, in the south-east corner of the Agora, a large building (90 x 125 ft) with multiple rooms. The presence of bronze bars as well as discs cut from them (i.e. blanks), the existence of traces linked to the refinement of the ore and the discovery nearby of inscriptions evoking the workshop makes the identification plausible of this building as a workshop, although we cannot be certain (no remains relating to the minting of silver have been found there). The other cases put forward for ancient Greece (Laos, Pella, Argos, Paphos and Aï Khanoum) are more conjectural. The simple discovery of monetary blanks, whether silver or bronze, is not enough to prove the existence of a workshop at this location. Quite different is the case of the great workshop of imperial Rome, whose plan revealed by the excavation under the basilica of San Clemente corresponds to that given by the Forma Urbis. Indeed, between the Caelian and the Esquiline, a large building could be the monetary workshop. The rectangular building, with exterior walls built from large blocks of tuff, houses a succession of narrow, barrel-vaulted rooms which seem to have never had access or openings to the outside. The building was destroyed and rebuilt in the second part of the 3rd century and its destruction could be linked to the revolt of mint workers under Aurelian (270-275 AD). Twenty years ago, during the excavation works of a building at Trier, archaeologists discovered under a layer of 5 ft of debris, near the Porta Nigra, within the walls of the Roman city, more than 300 coins of the end of the reign of the Tetrici, a fragment of a 145g bronze ingot, 18 pounds of copper bars made in open moulds, uniformly elongated and rod-shaped, 40 copper bars with grooves for separating segments and many flattened blanks. This discovery seems to indicate that the main workshop at the time of the Gallic Empire was indeed located in this location. What do we know about the minting process and the workers of the mint ? Concretely, the striking required three people: 1) a person responsible for the striking, wielding with both hands a hammer with a thin and long handle, 2) a person responsible for the tongs, holding at arm's length the reverse die, and 3) an apprentice placing the blanks on the obverse die first, removing the printed coin then. The instruments represented on the reverse of this Carasia denarius (46 BC) were for a long time considered as the production implements of monetary workshops. It is now believed that they are in fact only the tools associated with the god of metallurgy, Vulcan. The apparent punch die on this type may be a cap of Liberty, and the lower die a generic anvil. The cap-shaped object is wreathed like a Dioscurus cap, which is the same cap worn by Vulcan. Fortunately, the study of numismatics has allowed us to confirm the manufacturing process of ancient coins, as well as the role of the different laborers working in their production. Two tesserae preserved in Paris and Vienna gives us a fairly precise idea of what was happening inside a Roman mint. On the reverse, a coin minting scene and the workshop building on the right. We can notice a character who handles the hammer, one who manages the blanks under his elbow [center], and one who holds the mobile die. Next is a contorniate of Nero with on the reverse a scene of work in the monetary workshop: a figure seated right holds the coin-blank on the obverse die, a second, reclining left, holds the reverse die, a third, standing right, raises a hammer; another figure standing left on the right holding a staff or sword; another figure standing right on the left. Many inscriptions (CIL VI, 42-44) were discovered (inscribed on the base of some statues) at the end of the 16th century in Rome between the Colosseum and the Lateran. They are explicitly dated to the year 115 AD, under the reign of Trajan, and seemed to be linked to monetary workers , to the point that it is considered that the workshop, after its move from the temple of Juno Moneta on the Arx, was located nearby. They listed the staff of the workshop: there were 25 officinatores, 17 signatores, 11 suppostores and 39 malliatores. But what did these Latin names describe ? For malliatores, it’s pretty obvious. The Latin malleus designating the hammer, it is about the strikers, those who deliver the blow with the mace. For suppostores, it is less obvious. It comes from the verb suppono, which means “to place under”. Le Gaffiot mistakenly translates as “he who puts the coin under the pendulum”, with the only occurrences being inscriptions. Numismatists agree to see the worker who places the blank on the fixed die, placed under the movable die. It’s for the signatores that it gets complicated. The signator is the one who makes the signum, “the mark, the sign, the seal, the image”. For a long time, specialists understood “the one who makes the image”, therefore the coin engraver. But we find the word scalptores elsewhere. Today, most numismatists, like Woytek, see it as someone who holds the movable die, who ensures its condition, the good association of the coins and will, finally , print the image. It seems that the officinatores took care of the administration. This must be the generic term for Mint officials. But we will also observe that only the freedmen insist on their status as officinators, from which slave agents seem to be excluded. According to the inscriptions, the fact that the malliatores are all slaves is hardly surprising: it is the most difficult and tiring role. The signatores are overwhelmingly freedmen: this role undoubtedly entailed a lot of responsibilities. The dies have been previously engraved by workers called scalptores (Woytek 2012). We could therefore believe that 48 freedmen and 45 slaves worked at the Rome Mint in 115, headed by a freedman exactor and his deputy, also a freedman. And that the most difficult tasks should fall to the slaves. A hundred people for a coinage workshop seems to be a reasonable number for this period, and gives us an approximate idea of all the employees working on the production in a Roman mint. Hoping that archeology will teach us in the future more about the production of ancient monetary workshops, because several questions remain unanswered: were the flans struck hot or cold ? What was the quantity of coins produced daily by an average workshop ? And about the lifespan of the dies. How many coins could be struck with a die set, and were they automatically recut to the point of some wear ? Thank you for reading this article and I would be happy to read your comments about it. Notes Amandry, Michel, La monnaie Antique, 2018 Van Meter, David, The Handbook of Roman Imperial Coins, 1991 bnumis.com Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum, Vol VI

HOW MANY HISTORICAL MISTAKES WILL WE FIND IN THE SECOND ONE ???

And here’s the father…

I will take the afternoon off tomorrow for watching it with my family and friends, and here in Montreal it will be the first total eclipse since 1972. If you want to help astronomy and science to progress about the study of the sun, please consider downloading the application SUNSKETCHER on your phone and you could photograph the eclipse wherever you are located. PLEASE do it ! https://science.nasa.gov/citizen-science/sunsketcher/ and Sol INVICTVS will be defeated today…

Nice one Anton. This coin commemorates the victories of Lucius Verus over the Parthians (Victoria Parthica) and the return to peace on the eastern border of the Empire. The triumph was accompanied by a donativum and a fourth imperial acclamation for Marcus Aurelius and Lucius Verus.

Felt nothing in Montreal. But why not a coin related to earthquake ? This one was issued to commemorate Tiberius' assistance to the city of Magnesia ad Sipylum fallowing its destruction in the great earthquake of 17 AD in Lydia. Up to 15 towns and cities were destroyed or badly damaged. He agreed to waive all taxes due for a period of 5 years. He further sent 10 millions Sestertii to assess their needs.

In this new publication written by Edward E. Cohen, do not look for imperial Roman coins, or even provincial ones, apart from a few exception like the coinage of Tyre or the coins of Caesar struck on the occasion of his 52nd birthday. If the author touches on these areas, his study focuses 99% on dated Greek coins. These are found more particularly in the eastern part of the Mediterranean. As for the periods discussed, they relate more to the classical and Hellenistic periods. This new edition (DCA2) is not only a rework of the first title, but a completely revised version of the work by integrating all the data that has appeared on the market since the publication of the first edition. The work is sometimes even in advance since it includes the Lagid kings from Ptolemy V to Cleopatra VII (205-30 BC). The work thus goes from 652 pages (DCA) to 908 pages (DCA2) and is therefore divided into two volumes. The catalog, with nearly 1,200 types of coins struck (1,187 exactly) in all metals (gold, silver and bronze) and more than 10,000 entries for different dated coins, constitutes a set which makes it an essential reference for entire Greek world, with numerous rarities and completely new coins referencing both reference works and the most recent sales catalogues. As the author points out, in Antiquity more than fifty different dating systems or eras could have been used and constitute a real headache for collectors and sometimes also researchers. These systems vary from one region to another, sometimes from one city to another in the same region. Some cities may have used several different dating systems throughout history. The complexity can be extreme, certain eras are not necessarily fixed precisely and may experience slight distortions. The structure of the new edition (DCA 2) is built around 21 chapters of unequal importance, sometimes with approximate and inappropriate titles. The first volume covers pages 1 to 426 and volume 2 from 427 to 908. In each of the volumes, at the top, you will find the unnumbered table of contents to mark because you will undoubtedly need to refer to it, in particular if you are using the work for the first time. The first volume includes the coinages of Northern Europe and Central Asia with the Seleucid kingdom and the Syrian cities, the Parthian kingdom and the territories dependent on it as well as Anatolia and Armenia. As for the second volume, it is devoted to Phoenicia, the Mediterranean islands, the south of the Levant, the Nabataean kingdom, Africa and the Lagid kingdom, to coins dated by the month as well as to undated coins, but using the alphanumeric Greek alphabet. A « must have » for all numismatists or collectors, published by CNG and available for 195 USD.

If you absolutely wants to buy a replica, please buy from the best. Here on Etsy: https://www.etsy.com/ca-fr/shop/SlaveyArt?ref=shop-header-name&listing_id=1309307363&from_page=listing

Nice one. This is definitely a schnauzer paw print, weighting probably between 30-35 pounds. IMHO the beast was around 5 years old, with salt & pepper colored hair and black eyes.

Nice to see you back. If I recall correctly, you were from Sweden. Where are you now ?

Not a chance my friend. If I were a moderator here, the number of members would drop to 250…

https://www.sprinklr.com/blog/community-moderation/

Happy ending finally. Your coin was minted in Trier circa 264-265, and as you noticed, the curly hair makes it a RIC 269 in the new RIC V.4.

There was a little 50 pages book published about the hoard and its discovery. Often seen on EBay for about 10 $; it’s worth it, a lot of nice pictures inside.

From the new RIC V.4:

195 GBP from Spinks.

Maybe you could ask one of the authors or contributors:

I’m not sure how we can qualify our member of the week; a skilled computer scientist, an athlete, an astronomer, a bibliophile or a numismatist ? I’ll let you decide for yourself, but one thing is for sure, he’s our favorite Irish collector here on Numisforums. So let’s talk with @akeady ! Can you tell us a bit about yourself, where you're from, your family, work...? I'm from Ireland - Galway in the west, but I live near Dublin now. I design integrated circuits ("chips") - my first chip (1991) was on a 2.4um technology, nowadays they're on 55m and even 10nm. This is one of my chips from the 1990s - a Sigma-Delta ADC with an interesting bandpass sampling arrangement at the input. I'd do it a bit differently now, but then I was young and knew everything. Do you still run, like tropical fish, practice astronomy... ? I still run, but 2023 was my slowest year in a long time - I was injured much of the time. I've taken a break since the Dublin Marathon (end of October), but will be back for 2024, hopefully faster. I played some sports as a kid (hurling, mostly - check the sport out on YouTube if you don't know it - I wasn't very good!), then very little for a long time until one evening in late September 2007 when out with a couple of friends and one of them said we should do the Dublin Marathon (end of October). I'll never understand why, but it seemed like a sound idea. At that time the marathon never sold out, so I could still enter - the other two chickened out after trying a run the next day. I mentioned wanting to run at work and was met with some scepticism so I didn't say any more about it until the day after, when I hobbled in with my medal and some awful blisters. This is after a Budapest half marathon in 2021 - I'd worked up an appetite at least. I've got tropical fish - all the fish currently in my tank were given to me by people getting out of fish-keeping. This is my main telescope - well, this was it in 2018. It's much the same now, but with a different Celestron powerpack. The 'scope is a Celestar 8 8" SCT that l've owned from new in the 1990s, mounted on a CG-5 GEM mount (it was originally on a fork mount). I haven't had the telescope outside for a long time now, but my intention is to build a remote controlled observatory someday. I have another 80mm Skywatcher 'scope which is "upstairs somewhere". I haven't been skiing recently, but this is how I looked one time. Aidan, how did you get interested in ancient coinage ? What was the first coin you ever bought ? I used to trade coins and stamps with a neighbour as a kid in the 1970s and bought a few fairly cheap coins in the early 1980s on occasional trips to Dublin. Mostly Irish and UK farthings and the likes of an 1805 halfpenny. My late aunt gave me the remnants of her collection around 1980/'81 - she mostly had accumulated pre-decimal and foreign coins from circulation in the 1970s. I still have all of those and they're still mostly in the bags she stored them in! Then I collected nothing for years until in 2001 in Madrid I picked up a denarius of Marcus Aurelius at the weekly Rastro market. I bought a couple of coins from Spink a bit later (early 2002) - a Roman Republican denarius and an Istros drachm. Not long after, I discovered eBay and it's been downhill ever since. The Marcus Aurelius coin was stolen in a burglary in 2004, along with several other Roman Imperial coins, but I still have the Republican denarius and Istros coin. I've never sold a coin but have given away a handful to young collectors - we've got to keep people interested in the hobby, so someone will buy our collections :D Can you tell us an anecdote about a coin you own ? Your best bargain ? Your rarest coin ? The specimen you’ll never sell ? The one you dream of acquiring ? My favourite coin for a long time (since 2007) has been this Syracuse tetradrachm: At that time, Spink had some coins for sale on their website. I spotted this there and liked it. I went to the London Coin Fair in November 2007 and there she was at their table. I ran out, got some cash and came back and bought her. While it's a worn example, in-hand it still looks a lot better than the photograph and was my first Sicilian tetradrachm. If my house were on fire, l'd run back to save Arethusa (actually, she's in a safety deposit box, so I probably wouldn't have to run back). I'm not going to go into the journey this coin had to me, but I bought it in January 2022 and it arrived in August of that year... Entella tetradrachm. I can't think what my best bargain is and right now I would only sell some duplicates. Of course, l'd like a Herakleidas tetradrachm of Katane, a Kimon tet of Syracuse and Euainetos decadrachm of Syracuse :D The decadrachm is maybe achievable if I bought nothing else for a year or two and/or sold some other coins. What do you collect exactly ? What is the size of your collection ? I have a few different collecting areas: Roman Republican coins - this has been the main focus of my collection for several years and includes some imitative coins from the Eravisci and others. Irish coins. Ancient Greek coins - I have a vague aim to make a collection of the major cities and their iconic coins - Owl from Athens, Pegasus from Corinth, Turtle from Aigina and so on. Papal medals - these are good value for a chunky piece of silver or bronze. Anything else that takes my fancy - if I won the lottery, l'd have lots of Sicilian coins. I posted recently that l'd just reached 1000 Roman Republican coins. On the Tantalus database, I currently have 2351 coins entered - mostly, but also modern - Irish and World. I have more to enter - if I ever enter all my modern coins, it will be thousands more, but they're more of an accumulation than a collection. I started collecting RR coins in earnest to make an entry for a display competition at the Numismatic Society of Ireland and later in order to illustrate a talk. I became hooked :) This is most of my Roman Republican collection - housed in two Abafil Marmotta cases - the upper one holds 20 trays and the lower was a special order which holds 10 (or 11?) double depth trays - needed for the very thick aes grave coins. I have only two double depth trays, but the regular trays fit too. I store things by Crawford number and keep the bronze and silver coins apart - because the bronze coins are typically much larger than the denarii and other silver coins. Denarii and smaller coins fit in the 77-compartment trays and most of the bronzes fit in the 40-compartment trays. The largest coins are in 12- and 6-compartment trays. This is one tray I pulled out at random - it has a 14 Cr. 340/1 coins, but all different, in that they have different symbols, etc. (direction of horseman and Apollo varies too!). I will probably store some duplicates in paper envelopes at some stage and reserve the trays for one example of each type. Another tray - I try to leave gaps in each tray to allow for future additions without having to move too many coins. Some bronzes... And some aes grave - not the biggest, but too thick for a regular tray, so this is an extra-deep one. And that's about it - I have a few RR coins in slabs which I haven't broken out, plus a chunk of a currency bar that's too big to fit into a tray. The rest of the coins are in a safety deposit box (large - it takes Abafil trays, but I may switch to putting coins into paper envelopes there to save space), three other coin cabinets - a nice Zecchi cabinet in a photo' below, a Peter Nichols cabinet (the trays are not deep enough for large coins) and a small Swann cabinet I got at auction a few years back. What did you write about ? I haven't written anything coin-related. I am working (very slowly) on an online database for my coins, but I need some time off to make much progress. In what part of history are you interested in ? The history of the Roman Republic and Irish history, mostly. I've got an Aer Lingus credit card that gives me a couple of free return flights within Europe each year - I've just booked long weekends in Athens in May and Rome in June. Rome is one of my favourite cities - my profile background is a photo' I took in 2022 from the Capitoline Museums looking over the Forum. I've only been in Athens once - in 1989 on a great inter-rail trip - so I hope to take lots of photos and visit the coin museum. In 2015, I drove around Sicily for a few days to see where the greatest coins come from - Palermo, Segesta, Selinus, Agrigento, Syracuse and Catania - to be revisited someday. The Paolo Orsi Museum in Syracuse has a great coin collection in the basement with more than 30 decadrachms in one display cabinet alone, if memory serves me. Do you have a numismatic goal for the next year ? I'd like to fill some more gaps in the RR field - maybe a Caesar aureus, but probably I'll be distracted by other things. What numismatic books do you own / consult most often ? (I took far too many photos here). I like books - this shelf has the standard RR reference - Crawford - two copies, for good measure, but volume Il of the second set is just a collection of photocopies of the plates of the real volume I| (Spink sold it to me like that!). Plus Sydenham and the Kestner catalogue and the RBW collection and other things. Of course, anyone collecting RR coins needs Italian Cast Coinage and Historia Numorum Italy: And the Red Banti: And History and Coinage of the Roman Imperators (and the Green Banti): And Fides & Kairos: And a few other festschrifts: And Babelon: Arma et Nummi, Warsaw Collection, RSC and a couple of interesting books on Roman History and coinage: Oh, and Grueber's BMCRR, with Admiral Smyth's catalogue of the Northumberland collection: I also collect Roman Imperial coins and Greek coins to some extent, so have picked up a good few other books - BMCRE & Sear's RCV: RIC - not including the new RIC V.4: And the nice Handbooks of Greek Coinage: Byzantine and more Greek: And more: And there's a lot more, but that gives some idea of the clutter. I've ended up with books in several languages, some of which I don't understand. I've got books in English, French, Spanish, German, Italian and Catalan. I survived a few months in France back in 1991 and did a few courses at the Instituto Cervantes here in Dublin so can manage to read Spanish too. German, not so much; Italian and Catalan, where they're similar to Spanish and/or French. The last book l've got is the new RIC volume V part 4, covering the Gallic Empire. I have fewer than half a dozen coins of this period, but it's nice to keep the set complete. Many thanks Aidan for your time and generosity. I’m looking forward to read the comments of other members about your fantastic collection. In the meantime, please take a look here to see it in detail: https://www.tantaluscoins.com/browse.php?uname=ethnucoins

Here are two Victorinus’ imitations minted with the same pair of dies. On the first one the dies were brand new, on the other one you can notice some general wear + the strike was not as sharp as on the first coin.

Many studies have been published about what are the motivations of forgers, what’s in their mind exactly. Money is not the reason # 1. Here is a quote from one of these analyses: « The psychological need for recognition, the need to present oneself if even in their mind a belief that they are able to fool the museums, and the unsuspecting public is important to the forger. He gains a great deal of satisfaction from having outsmarted everyone and often made money in doing so. »

Very good question. Over time metal alloys do not always remain stable, they can slowly separate into their more stable natural components. An example of this happening with ancient silver coins becoming fragile is the crystallization of silver. Stable silver only contains about 1% copper at room temperature. This proportion increases when the silver is heated, so the heat is used to combine silver and copper into an alloy which slowly degrades at room temperature. Monetary silver is almost always a combination of silver with roughly 1.5% to 15% copper. Adding a little copper to silver normally makes the silver softer and more resistant to wear. Silver and copper do not mix well, and over time (300-500 years or more), at normal temperatures, the copper will begin to separate from the silver. Silver crystallization is the selective precipitation of copper from the silver alloy within crystalline boundaries, it is only the copper crystals that become visible when they separate from the alloy and they begin to corrode, weakening so does the money. The crystallization of silver is a natural process which, over time (300 years or more), separates the copper from the silver because this alloy is not stable. In this way they take empty spaces among the silver particles making the currency porous and fragile. This phenomenon mainly occurs on silver alloys with a copper content of 1.5% to 10%. Silver alloys with more copper content are resistant to this phenomenon. So theoretically it could be artificially produced by high heating the silver, but in reality it would be very difficult because the heating required would be towards the melting point of silver. Maybe we need the expertise of a metallurgist, a chemist or even better a skilled forger….