Ocatarinetabellatchitchix

Findspot Found/Acquired: Alexandria (Egypt) Africa: Egypt: Iskandariya, el- (Governorate): Alexandria (Egypt) Curator's comments Published: Ein Gott 215, no. 43, p. 52. Bibliographic references Sculpture / Catalogue of Greek Sculpture in the British Museum (1944) Fluck et al. 2015 / Egypt: Faith after the Pharaohs (p.50) Interesting fact: In 1992, The bulk of the chewing gum (vandalism) was removed with a scalpel, the residual was removed with Butanone MEK on cotton wool swabs...

It mainly depend WHEN the coins were discovered. In the past, the Greek authorities demanded often difficult to obtain documentation te prove such coins were exported from Greece before the MOU's 2011 effective date. When the importer was unable to provide that information, the coins were seized for repatriation to the « country of origin ».

March 21 2023 Manhattan District Attorney Alvin L. Bragg, Jr., announced today the return of 29 looted antiquities to the People of Greece. Among the pieces, which are collectively valued at over $20 million, is the extraordinarily rare Eid Mar Coin, which commemorates the murder of Julius Caesar. All were seized pursuant to multiple criminal investigations into high-profile traffickers and smugglers. The antiquities were returned during a repatriation ceremony at the Greek Consulate attended by Greek Minister of Culture Lina Mendoni, Consul General Konstantinos Konstantinou, and Ivan J. Arvelo, Special Agent in Charge at Homeland Security Investigations, New York. “I am proud that under my administration this office has now repatriated 950 antiquities to 17 countries,” said District Attorney Bragg. “I thank our outstanding team of analysts, investigators and attorneys, along with our law enforcement partners, for their excellent work finding and returning these historical marvels.” https://manhattanda.org/d-a-bragg-returns-29-antiquities-to-greece/ First, let’s go back in the past: In June 2006, the Greek authorities repatriated a rare specimen of a Eid Mar denarius which was confiscated in England: it was owned by the London office of CNG since June 2005. Why ? « evidence suggests that the Greeks went after it because of the people involved. The man who sold it to CNG turned out to be a Greek national with a criminal record for trafficking in stolen antiquities, and the transaction was arranged by a Munich coin dealer who once worked for a notorious European trafficker, a member of a Munich cartel whose looted treasures found their way to studios, museums and auction houses around the world. A CNG executive said his company had no idea ». My first question is quite simple: What proves that the coin had indeed been discovered in Greece? Answer in the newspaper article: « How the Greek government determined — and proved to the British High Court — that this one emanated from Macedonia is unclear. » Asked that question at the press conference following the coin's recovery, Voulgarakis said simply, "Look, it would have been handled differently in Greece if it were not certain that it emanated from us." (His words are translated from the original Greek.) He indicated that the Munich dealer and his associate — both apparently Greek citizens — had been arrested, but he refused further comment ». All Greece would have to do under the European Union directive "is show by a preponderance of the evidence that a cultural object has been illegally exported. If you want to argue against them, you have to come up with some contrary evidence." In the same article, please notice an interesting commentary made: « According to the Hellenic Ministry of Culture, only four EID-MAR coins have an established Greek origin: two that were found near the northern Greek city of Florina and now reside in the Archaeological Museum of Pella (Greece); and two others, one silver and one gold, in private European collections ». And one gold… https://scvhistory.com/scvhistory/signal/coins/worden-coinage1106b.htm Currently, there are only three known and authentic examples of an Eid Mar aureus. Which of the three was the Greek government referring to ? Let's do a brief summary of the three pieces in question as well as their historical provenance. 1-THE HOLED COIN 1932 The British Museum was first shown the coin but couldn't afford to buy it. 1952 Dr. Leo Biaggi de Blasys privately purchased it from Cahn. 1953 Cahn first published an account at the Actes du Congrès Internationale de Numismatique, Paris. 2004 NUMISMATICA ARS CLASSICA NAC AG, AUCTION 27, LOT 282 (bought by Barry Feirstein) 2008 NUMISMATICA ARS CLASSICA NAC AG, AUCTION 45, LOT 42 (bought by Michael Winckless) 2010-2021 on display at the British Museum in London 2022 NUMISMATICA ARS CLASSICA NAC AG, AUCTION 132, LOT 474 2-THE DEUTSCHE BUNDESBANK COIN 1989 Published by Cahn (recently acquired by a California collector) 1990 Numismatic Fine Arts XXV, 306 (Thanks to @panzerman [John] for the pictures) 1993 Sotheby’s Zurich, 1993, 87 Today In the numismatic collection of the Deutsche Bundesbank. Question: Isn’t weird that this coin (of an extreme rarity) suddenly appeared on the market without any previous provenance ? 3-THE ROMA COIN 2015 According to the court documents, Beale also admitted that in 2015 he entered into an agreement with an Italian coin dealer to sell the Eid Mar coin, which was minted in 42BC to commemorate the assassination of Julius Caesar on the Ides of March. The two men travelled to Munich and paid €450,000 ($490,000; £385,000) in cash for the coin, despite it having no provenance paperwork or any other form of documentation. (Cointalk post by R.Beale in 2022) https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-66594076 2015 (?) Beale had tried to sell it at the New York International Numismatics Convention. 2016 The coin first surfaced on the international art market, where it was offered for sale in Munich with no provenance. 2020 it was sold at auction for $4.2 million in October to a U.S.-based buyer. 2023 The EID MAR was seized in February from an undisclosed location. I want to share an interesting comment by the lawyer Peter K. Tompa: « The lot received considerable presale publicity. One would think if the Greek government had solid evidence that the coin was stolen from a Greek archaeological site, Greek authorities could have requested Scotland Yard to halt the auction so that the matter could be investigated. Instead, years later, the Manhattan DA's Antiquities Trafficking Unit engineered the repatriation to Greece after arresting Beale on fraud and stolen property charges based almost entirely on detailed allegations that Beale and Vecchi faked the provenance of the Brutus Aureus and another ancient silver coin from Naxos. (…) So what was the basis for the decision to deprive that individual of his valuable purchase so it could be sent to Greece? According to a New York Times article which appears to be sourced to information provided by the Manhattan DA's office, the decision hinged on the statement that "Experts said they believe the coin was likely discovered more than a decade ago in an area of current-day Greece where Brutus and his civil war ally, Gaius Cassius Longinus, were encamped with their army." If repatriating a coin worth $4.2 million was indeed solely based on the speculation of unnamed experts, that should concern everyone. After all, Roman coins circulated from Britain to Sri Lanka, and scholars even disagree where Brutus minted his coins. So, absent additional evidence to support this contention, it would appear that any such "expert opinion" was concocted solely to justify the return, with some confidence that mainstream media wouldn't ask too many hard questions that might call into question the Manhattan DA's narrative. » https://coinsweekly.com/a-lawyers-assessment-of-the-return-of-the-brutus-aureus/ My last question: the Greek authorities had known about the existence of the Roma specimen since at least 2006, so why did they wait until 2023 to make a request for confiscation and repatriation ? So many questions and so few answers... and unfortunately, I am convinced that the trial of R. Beale and I.Vecchi will not provide us with more information... Please share your comments or thoughts!

If you enter the word WITHDRAWN on the Acsearch site, it will give you 9,559 results, the vast majority of them showing the pictures. Maybe someone who has more spare time than me could verify which auction houses like to remove their images…

I remember seeing the same coin available on Vcoins, MAShops…and EBay with three different prices… And one little tip for anyone who wants to buy on one of these platforms : you can always NEGOTIATE the price, and sometimes even have the free shipping. Nothing to lose to try it. 💰

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: