Kaleun96

Sorry what's the question? I believe yours is in the 327-323 BC range. Unless the coin has an actual date on it (e.g. like Sidon/Tyre), very few Alexander tetradrachms can be dated to a specific year.

Nice one! I was tempted to pick it up myself. This is from the early chronology in Macedonian Alexander tetradrachms, suspected to be in the first "group" that were issued circa 332-326 BC. The janiform head symbol in particular is interesting because it is also found on the last Philip II tetradrachms minted during Alexander's reign (and before Philip III brought them back). But it's not only the janiform head type that is special in this way, according to Troxell and Price, the janiform, prow, rudder, stern, and fulmen symbols are all among the first tetradrachms minted at Amphipolis, all of which share their control symbol with one of Philip's posthumous tetradrachms. As Price believed the first "Alexanders" were struck in Amphipolis, he started his numbering from the Amphipolis types, hence the low "Price" number for yours. The prow symbol facing right type is thought to come first for a few reasons (Herakles style and the fact that on Philip's tetradrachms the prow always faces right) and then this is thought to be followed by the left-facing prow symbol due to die links and the thinking that they decided to make the prow left facing instead of right. Which comes next after that is uncertain, likely they were all struck at similar times anyway. While 332-326 BC may be a somewhat large date range for the first Alexanders to be minted in Macedonia, I think we can be fairly sure these would date at the upper end of that range, somewhere around 332-330 BC. It's not certain when the Philip II tetradrachms sharing the same symbols were minted either, I discuss this problem a bit earlier in this thread here: They are generally given a date range of 336-328 BC, according to Le Rider, but again I think we can be fairly sure they date towards the first half of that range, or at least some of them do. Oh and the reason "Amphipolis" is in quotes is because no one is really sure that the main Macedonian mint was at Amphipolis during this period. Pella is an option to, as is some third city I forget the name of. For now, most people assume it's Amphipolis or that Amphipolis stands in as a placeholder for whichever city it really was. Troxell discusses this a bit, as well as almost everything else I've mentioned above, so if you're interested her book is worth a read and can be found online in a few places, one of which is here: http://numismatics.org/digitallibrary/ark:/53695/nnan174624 Here's my "Price 4" tetradrachm I picked up a few months ago with the left-facing prow:

All the white components were designed and 3D printed by me. I'm happy to share the files if you want to get them printed yourself, though I attach it to an optical post assembly from Thorlabs that is probably more expensive than most people want to pay but is needed to adjust the height of the platform or tilt it (the vertical silver rod, the black adapter, and another silver rod that extend horizontally):

Nice, Price 3304 is quite a rare type! However, it's unlikely these are artist/engraver signatures but rather some other form of control mark. I think the main evidence for that is because these control marks were later moved to the reverse of the coins and it seems unlikely to have such a large range of engravers from a relatively short period who all signed their dies. CNG says it better than I could so i'll just quote them below: https://www.acsearch.info/search.html?id=2461110 Great coin nonetheless though, I'm keeping my eye out for these early Arados types myself! Many of the earliest Alexander tetradrachms from both Sidon and Tyre actually have dates on them, so they're often referred to as "dated" types. Both are dated in relation to their respective kings: King 'Ozmilk of Tyre and King Abdalonymos of Sidon. Martin Price initially attributed the Tyre types to Ptolemais-Ake but they're now widely accepted to have come from Tyre. What is thought to be the very earliest tetradrachms from both Tyre and Sidon are undated however. I happened to have just picked up one of those recently. It's the first example listed under Tyre in the table below. It happens to share an obverse die with the very first Alexander tetradrachm issued at Sidon in 333 BC and is believed to have travelled to Tyre with the engraver. So this evidence has helped set the chronology of Sidon minting Alexanders before Tyre. source: https://www.academia.edu/44562911/Sidon_to_Tyre_the_Macedonian_administration_and_relative_chronology

Btw @KyNumis I think it's from the Sardes mint with a torch in the left field and some monogram under the throne. I can't tell which exact type it is from these photos but you can try compare it to the ones here: http://numismatics.org/pella/results?q=statedAuthority_facet%3A"Philip+III+Arrhidaeus"+AND+denomination_facet%3A"Drachma"+AND+mint_facet%3A"Sardis"+AND+symbol_rev_facet%3A"torch" It might be the one labelled British Museum: HPB,p50.13.A under the Price 68 type as it doesn't have the footstool the others have, the throne is missing the cross-bar, and the monogram could match. Price 69 is the only other close match that I see but it has a single example so if I had to guess, I'd say it's Price 68. edit: I didn't find it under Naumann's auction listings on ACSearch but possible it was identified differently (I tried searching under philip sardes and then with/without "torch" or the price number etc).

Don't you pay VAT on imports from outside the EU in France? I believe the VAT on ancient coins in Belgium is 6% so it sounds like a VAT import fee. FedEx and DHL will always charge you this since they do the import process themselves, whereas if it is sent via registered mail it may slip past without being pinged for the VAT import fee. The fee is also calculated based on the item value + shipping cost.

I shared my initial thoughts on the Discord when you first asked and thought it was OK but I've just posted this in reply to your reddit thread as some people are saying it's cast (unlikely, IMO):

Ah that makes sense, thanks! I think you're right that it would give a good estimation of the actual relief, it's a shame that it is somewhat difficult to do in practice and with lots of potential for measurement error due to the number of measurements you need to make/approximate. For example, measuring x1 or x2 requires you to measure from A to C and while finding the spot for A may be easy due to it being at the edge of the devices, pinpointing the highest spot C could be more difficult.

Great thread, looking forward to your next instalment! Also it's nice to have a place to discuss this topic in more detail. As you say, it often comes up but the discussion then gets spread across multiple threads and often repeated. I believe I've shared this on NumisForums before but for anyone who has missed it, a few months ago I wrote a lengthy article summarising a few points about the origin of Alexander's tetradrachm. It touches a lot on what kapphnwn as mentioned already but also dives into some of the iconographic arguments that suggests a 333/2 start for the first Alexander-type tetradrachms. There's still more for me to write on the topic but it was already getting long and I haven't even touched on drachms or the gold staters yet. @kapphnwnone thing I'd like to hear your thoughts on - the Philip II tetradrachms thought to be minted during Alexander's reign mostly featured the same set of control symbols that are found on the earliest Alexander-type tetradrachms in "Amphipolis". On the face of it, it doesn't seem problematic as you might assume there is a progression in the symbols and when Alexander started minting his tetradrachms, he just used whichever symbols were currently being used at the time for the Philips. But I find the die-linkage within these types difficult to align with that thinking, if we are to assume the Philips were being minted from the period 336-332 BC (and likely for a few more years). Were they perhaps using the same symbols in rotation throughout this period, or were they using the same symbols simultaneously and the symbols may have just represented different anvils at the mint or similar. But then there's greater die-linkage between some symbols than others, not what you would expect if they were used simultaneously. The die-linkages also don't seem to indicate a strict order in which you see symbol X being used and then transitioned to symbol Y and then to symbol Z etc. I'm still not sure what is the most likely scenario. I do think the minting of the Philips was likely concurrent with the first Alexanders, at least for a short time, but I also think these Philips must've originally started production soon after Alexander took over in 336 BC, so there is a 3-4 year gap of Philips being minted before the Alexanders. But if that's the case, which ones are they? It doesn't appear we can tell that based on the control symbols alone.

Sorry I lost you at "draw a line profile" 😁 Do you mean to try and draw the profile of the relief from the side-on? Ideally i'm looking for a method that would be fast and easy, like at most taking two measurements with a calliper or similar tool.

That's a decent relief! At one point I tried to take measurements of this as it's not quite the same as a coin's thickness in the sense a thick coin doesn't always have a high relief. Though I soon fell down the rabbit hole of how you determine how high something is when there's no intrinsic "ground" to measure from. It seems like a similar problem that you have with measuring mountains in terms of elevation vs prominence: the elevation is measured from sea level but that doesn't necessarily reflect how prominent it is relative to other features around it (hence K2 being the 2nd highest mountain but 22nd in prominence). But back to coins, as we all know flans are rarely perfectly flan, particularly Greek tetradrachms, which can often be slanted. The edge of a coin can vary from 4mm in one area to 2mm in another. So when laid flat, the distance from the highest point to the lowest point in the fields will be wrong if the plane of the obverse face is not parallel to the surface its sitting on. I'm sure someone could figure out a "proper" way to measure the relief of a coin independent of thickness, if anyone has any ideas let me know! Maybe something like the difference between the maximum height of a coin when laying flat on a surface and the maximum thickness of the edge as measured from a point on each side of the coin that is in the fields (i.e. don't measure from where a portrait might be halfway off the flan and thus make that part of the edge seem overly thick).

Yeah I've been shooting with a black background for this reason up until now. There's no reason I can't continue that, I'd just like to have the option of changing the background as it gives me a bit more flexibility for my website.

Only if you are shooting with the wrong light metering setting, e.g. one where it takes an average exposure measure of the whole image. Then it will under-expose the coin because the background is so bright. If you select centre or spot metering then you can make sure the camera exposes for the coin and not the background. Or if you shoot in manual mode it's not a problem as you're controlling all the exposure settings yourself. That's an important point to mention for those shooting with their mobile phones though as they will likely run into this issue. I know some Android phones let you choose the light metering mode, I'm unsure if iPhones do but hopefully they do!

Here's some photos of two of the setups I mentioned above: the flat back-illuminated background with a sheet of diffusion gel over the LED, and the hemisphere dome back-illuminated background.

The past few weeks I've been struggling with something I mentioned in the beginning post of this thread. I mentioned I had found that using a mirror as a background works well for removing the background later in editing software. That much is still true, it does work well, though there is a limitation: you can't tilt the coin. At least this is the case if you have your setup so that the mirror tilts when you tilt the coin, as I do with my setup since the background and coin holder are integrated into one platform. What happens is when tilting the coin, the mirror is no longer directing light straight back at the lens and you end up with dark areas in the background that make background removal difficult. I knew this from the start and thought I'd try to solve the problem later. It may be that it can be solved by not tilting the mirror as the coin is tilted, theoretically I think this would work, but for my setup causes other problems so I haven't gone down that path yet. Instead, I looked into backlight illumination to help create a background of a consistent bright white (not perfect white but something close enough). So I mounted an LED to the coin platform and created a shroud that sat over it with some diffusion gel to help create an even light for the background. That much works well, the problem is that the light from the LED spreads out too far and hits the edge of the coin at multiple angles, not just from directly below up. In the third photo of a coin edge below, you can see this where the bright light bleeds over into the coin edge. This is a no-go for easy background removal. As mentioned, the problem is that the LED lights without lenses have a fairly broad angle so if you have an LED ring that is 60mm in diameter below a coin 25mm in diameter, light from the LED ring will hit the edge of the coin at some acute angle and illuminate too much of the edge. This can be partly solved in two ways: using a smaller LED ring that closely matches the diameter of the coin, or using a shroud around the coin to stop stray light hitting the edges. I tried both methods. I bought some 30mm LED rings and while better than 60mm, the problem remains. So next I tried using a shroud around the coin so that only light at a fairly perpendicular angle to the coin will illuminate the edges. This does work well, however the problem is that the shroud needs to be relatively close to the edge of the coin for this to work, I'm talking maybe 5mm or less. So you would need to make shrouds for multiple coin diameters and coin shapes, because not all coins are round. To me, that's unacceptable as a solution. Even though I've tried it before, I went back to trying a coloured background, similar to the theory of chroma keying in video editing. The problem with this, in both videos and photos, is that the background colour can bleed into the subject. You can see this in the first edge photo below, the yellow bleeds slightly into the coin's edge making clean background separation difficult. Of course this is expected as when you use a white background, you see white light reflected from the background bleeding into the coin's edge. The same thing is happening when you use a coloured background. So at this point I had come to the following conclusions: 1. A white non-illuminated background often isn't white enough for clean separation as it ends up appearing more grey than white and blending into the coin edge 2. A coloured non-illuminated background has enough colour separation from the coin edge but tends to reflect light onto the coin edge, mixing the keyed light with the coin edge and thus making quick background removal difficult. 3. An illuminated background definitely gets "white" enough in terms of colour separation from the coin's edge but too much bleeds light into the edge, again making background removal difficult. 4. Using a shroud around the coin with an illuminated background is not practical due to the number of different size and shaped shrouds that would be required for different coins. I did 3D print an iris/aperture as this would solve the issue of needing different sized shrouds but it would mainly work best only on round coins, not oval-shaped ones. My next thought was to have a non-flat illuminated background, specifically a convex background. The thinking is that illuminating a convex shape from the inside will directly light out and away from the coin while hopefully providing just enough illumination to create a consistent white-ish background. So I 3D printed a hemisphere and put the LED inside. Without turning on the LED, the hemisphere already helps in reducing any shadows of the coin on the background and may be good enough on its own to help making background removal easier. When the LED is turned on and the hemisphere is illuminated, the background is a much brighter and more consistent white-ish colour (edge 4 in pic below) with minimal light bleed onto the edge. There is still some but it is manageable. So that's where I'm at after a few days tinkering. Just wanted to share my thoughts/findings in case it helps anyone else or sparks some ideas of other things to try. Let me know if you have any thoughts, I'm open to trying some other things. There's a lot I have tried that I didn't mention here but I covered the main ones. N.B. - The photos below are focussed at the very edge of the coin, hence most of the coin is out of focus. Also, the problems mentioned in this post may not be much of a problem if you're photographing coins at relatively low magnification and/or resolution. I'm aiming for one-click edge separation to within +/- 2px of the real edge so I do need the separation to be nearly perfect. For most others, a little light bleed on the coin edge is not an issue because you can't notice it at lower resolutions. Caption for image below: 1. yellow background, not illuminated, yellow light bleeds into coin edge 2. mirror background, pretty good separation but coin edge may need to be brightened using a reflector unless you don't mind it being dark. main problem is that tilting the coin is impractical with this setup. 3. plain white background illuminated with 30mm LED ring, white light bleeds into coin edge 4. 3D printed white hemisphere background with LED illumination, minimal light bleed into coin edge, reasonable edge separation.

People would probably be more understanding if ancient coins hadn't been fetching record amounts for the past two years. Once BP goes up, it's never coming down, unlike inflation. Not to pick on any auction house in particular here, just speaking generally. Good to remember there's always CGB with their 12% BP and €12 DHL shipping.

If they buy top class specimens, it will be no different. They will price them at 5x the market value and they'll sit on eBay for even longer. It's just how these eBay sellers work and it's not limited to just coins either. Can't do much about it, it's not illegal, so I don't see the point in wasting much time on them 🤷‍♂️

This is a problem with pretty much any slabbed ancient coin on eBay and has been for a long time

What's the maximum resolution of the images you get from this camera? I don't think it says in the Amazon listing and I'm not sure if the photos you've uploaded are downscaled or cropped. There's two reasons you might get "soft corners" with this camera: the lens is not flat-field but curved-field, or the lens simply can't resolve the detail outside of the centre and these details will always appear blurry. It's easy to test which of these issues the lens has, though it's likely a combination of both. Move the focus of the lens up/down to see if you can get the edges of the coin to appear sharp - do this while keeping the coin in the centre of the image. If the coin edges always appear blurry, the issue is more that the lens can't resolve detail at the edges and there's not much you can do about it. On the other hand, if you find you can make the edges of the coin sharp by adjusting focus, even if the centre of the coin goes out of focus, you could use focus stacking to merge multiple photos into a single photo that is completely in focus. I wouldn't give the camera too much leeway on these issues just because it costs 80 euro. It is definitely possible to find lenses that are both flat-field and have excellent ability to resolve detail at the edges and corners of an image for a similar price. Of course, you've bought not only a lens but a full camera setup so it's not exactly a fair comparison. But one could, for instance, pair a couple of Raynox close-up lenses to achieve a similar level of magnification but with much better optical quality and then you a mobile phone to take a photo through the lens system. This has some other challenges and it's a bit awkward to take photos on your phone through another set of lenses but it is possible to get better optical quality at this price point if you know what to buy and happen to already have a smartphone from the last couple of years. That being said, I think your edited photos turned out quite well regardless and the soft edges are not too apparent. Though the photo resolution of these photos is quite small so it is harder to spot mildly out of focus or soft parts of the image anyway.

I think the example photos are mostly unlikely to be accurate, particularly this last one which has several photos of a quality you will definitely not obtain with this microscope. I venture to say none of them were taken with this microscope, the only one that might be is the first one of the coin, possibly also the bank note but I would guess not given all the others aren't from this microscope. The example image posted by one reviewer is closer to what kind of quality you will likely achieve. There looks to be a fair bit of purple fringing (chromatic aberration), soft details at the corners/edges, and limited resolving ability of the lens. In other words, par for the course for a macro/microscope camera in this price range. With a lens and image sensor so small and at this price, there's simply a limit to the quality you can get, so it's not surprising to see the results below. That being said, this is me comparing the camera to the example images, which isn't necessarily unfair because I think the example images are misleading, but you may already be aware that the examples are misleading and instead be expecting something closer to the photo below. In that case, 80 euro seems OK for an all-in-one simple to use bit of kit like this. Though only you will be able to say whether it meets your expectations. In my opinion, it might be useful for exploring your coin close-up but I wouldn't think it will take particularly nice photos of coins in general (i.e. for sharing online). A modern phone camera would probably be better for taking general photos of your coins even though it wouldn't have as much magnification as this microscope camera.

Works pretty well on desktop/large screens and it's a fun and interesting way to learn about coins. Though I personally think the home page might be too long and the constant moving and revealing of elements becomes a bit too much but that's just a personal preference thing. As the others mentioned, the site is not very responsive so the experience is quite poor on small screens. It's easy to test this yourself during development on a large screen by right click --> inspect element and then clicking on the little screen size icon in the top left corner of the tool panel (highlighted blue in the screenshot below, next to "Elements | Console | Sources" etc). You can then play around with how the site appears on different devices. Of course some content just won't display well on mobile at all such as the Tableau map since it might not be possible to rearrange the options/tool panel to be below the map rather than next to it. In cases like that it might be better to not display it at all or to force desktop mode.

Just heard back from Rob on the felt inserts, he says they're a synthetic felt and not wool felt. Not sure how much of a difference that might make in terms of abrasion, have you come across anything?

Nice pick-up! I've been hunting for one of the Herm examples the last few months and was underbidder on the Savoca example you linked. As for "wrestlers" versus Pankration, I think it could be Pankration given the lower-body holds of some poses (from a quick reading it seems this would not be allowed in traditional Greek wrestling?) but would you still refer to the combatants of Pankration as "wrestlers" or would you call them something else? Does Pankration also involve the wrestlers wearing belts, as we see on the Aspendos types? Though, IMO, we don't see anyone getting a hook to the abdomen in the poses, instead it's more likely that one wrestler is grappling the other wrestler's belt around their waist. Though it's relatively rare to see the belt depicted with any clarity, I believe that's what the poses are always imitating as it's common to see one hand grasping thin air in front of the other's abdomen while we know from other dies this is where the belt would have been. The Savoca one actually has a really nicely defined hand that is clearly grasping something in front of the abdomen, though what that something is, is not well defined. I saw a really great example with a nice, clear belt the other day but forgot where that was, so here's a less-good example from ACSearch: And this is just the wrestler's right hand grappling the shoulder of the other wrestler. I don't think we can quite relate it to the depiction of the pankration wrestlers in the figure you linked. I love these Aspendos types and have started collecting a few over the past 18 months or so. I'm mainly aiming for some of the rarer wrestler positions and reverse legend/symbol configurations but anything that has fresh dies and good style is on my radar too. I'll try to keep my selection to just a few 😄

It's not only fake sand patina you have to worry about with Zurqieh, they've posted some bad fakes in the past and I saw this one yesterday. I emailed them and after a bit of back-and-forth I got them to take it down, though only after they consulted with their expert. Turns out they "cleaned" it pretty poorly, making the surfaces look even worse and seemingly introducing a lot of cleaning scratches. That would explain why all their Seleucid tetradrachms have horrible surfaces from harsh cleaning. Note also how the listing photo hides the big gouge in the obverse edge that is clearly visible in their "uncleaned" photos. To their credit, they did take down the listing but they exercised less caution than many of us would given the facts I initially presented them with: And the pre-cleaned photos:

They used to up until early 2021 I think it was. Seems my last package sent via FedEx by them was around January 2021. It's a shame since FedEx is generally better than DHL here in Sweden in that they actually deliver to door and will call you beforehand to check you're home and ask for any building door codes etc.