Kaleun96

Thanks for sharing! This is/was right up my alley as back in university my honours thesis was on using statistical methods to determine sex from incomplete skeletal remains, though I've since forgotten most of what I had learnt. After a quick skim through the paper, I would say that the historical context for these tombs is doing a lot of heavy lifting in verifying the age and sex of the remains. Even with complete skeletons it can be difficult to say with a good degree of certainty whether a given person is male or female and in this case we're dealing with some scattered fragmentary remains or partially cremated remains. The leg wound for the skeleton in Tomb I definitely seems significant though, as it aligns so well with historical sources. That's not to say we shouldn't use the historical context to help form conclusions, only that we should be a bit wary about relying on them too heavily and be clear in the inherent problems of doing so. It seems that in the past this has happened with these tombs (e.g. the supposed eye wound in the cranial bones of Tomb II). It's also easy to get caught in a tautological trap where you say the bones are believed to belong to individual X because the historical sources support it and the historical sources are accurate and reliable because the bones of individual X support them. So rather than the evidence from the tombs providing strong support for the historical narratives or vice versa, I think the reliability of both exist instead on a bit of a shaky middle ground. Though out of the two, I think it's clear the historical sources are doing more to influence the analysis of the tomb than vice versa, which leaves open the possibility that if the historical material is inaccurate then the conclusions about the tomb could change significantly too. Throw in the issues with the confusion over which material belonged to which tomb (as well as some missing material) and I get the feeling this is far from the last we'll hear of studies on the identities of the remains in these tombs. On another note, I wonder if any of the teeth are in sufficient condition to derive age estimates from. Teeth sort of have growth lines like rings in a tree and you can count them to help determine how long the tooth had been growing and estimate age at death. I know traditionally that it has required some destructive testing (taking histological slices) but back when I was still at uni work was being done to correlate that with perikymata, which are the surface representations of these growth lines, so an age determination could be made non-destructively. Either way, will dig into some more later. Super exciting to see more and more research being done on these tombs and the conclusions as presented in the paper sound pretty reasonable so far.

Another one Fake: Host:

I've got some examples to follow-up my earlier post that talked about the second reflector to get some light hitting the coin from the opposite site. These aren't the fairest comparisons as the old photos may have been lit with additional lights and not only using my previous pseudo-axial ringlight and the coins have noticeably toned since then. Aspendos staters are also relatively flatly struck so aren't the best for showcasing depth but these are a coin I typically struggled with for this reason and I think the new photos make some definitive improvements. The only thing I might change is making the newer photos a touch brighter but otherwise I'm quite pleased with them. Old photos = top / black background New photos = bottom / transparent background Photos of the new device with the second reflector on the other side.

I definitely notice the axial and pseudo-axial method makes it harder to get naturally-lit edges in my photos as well. Bit of a pain because it can be tricky to light them without them standing out too much. By the way, why do you have to cut out the edges from background if your photos will always be on a black background? I used to darken the blacks around the edges when I was saving them to black backgrounds but I just relied on Lightroom's auto-mask on the brush to do that.

Interesting to hear! Great that the eBay glass worked out for you too. It's certainly the best I've yet found. Let me know if you come up with anything for the background separation issue. I went down a complicated rabbit hole by using an LED light from under the coin to provide separation. It ends up being similar to the axial light problem but in reverse: you need the light rays from the background to be perpendicular to the coin or else the light will bleed into the coin's edges and blend it with the background slightly. My current solution works great except for a minor focus stacking related side-effect but if you find an alternative solution I'd love to know as it may nullify that issue. I guess an obvious solution is just distance between the coin and a static background that you light separately. That would avoid reflections onto the coin edge if the distance is sufficient. Unfortunately in my case I don't have enough room for that separation.

Just a minor update this time. So with the angles involved it's difficult to balance getting enough light on the coin at a high enough angle that it will reflect back into the lens after bouncing off the coin. Higher angles tend to mean less of the light can be reflected onto the coin because the geometry simply doesn't allow it but if you use lower angles, you get more light bouncing off of the coin but lose the axial effect and most of this light is going to bounce away from, not back to, the lens making it wasted light. In one of the diagrams above I mentioned that I designed a "blocker" to prevent some of the reflected light from exiting the device because it will never reach a coin of the diameters I commonly photograph. In the screenshot below, only the light that is allowed to reflect onto the coin is shown and is depicted by the yellow highlighted areas. Behind that space you can see an empty rectangle of sorts, this light would reflect off of the first surface and then hit that triangle shaped blocker between it and the coin. So you can see I am wasting a fair amount of light but it's not that I necessarily need it either. It would be useful, though, if it can be used to light the coin from the other side and at a similar angle. I worked out that this should be possible with the right angles and came up with this: So the original reflection surface now has a secondary angle at the back, which previously just reflected light to nowhere. It now reflects the light horizontally (shown in green) across the device to a third reflector, which reflects it towards the coin at an 80 degree angle - same as the light reflected on the other side. I'm hoping this will give me a more even axial effect across the coin instead of the majority of that effect being seen on one side of the coin. I've also mounted magnets in the reflectors so that they can be removed and swapped out, in case I don't want this secondary reflection. One issue I had when initially testing this was that the white plastic reflectors really do not reflect a lot of light. The two reflections required for this secondary reflection (green) meant almost no light actually reached the coin from this side, only from the original side. I then tried covering all the white reflectors in aluminium tape, which has a mirror-like finish, but that reflected too much light! My flash was too powerful at its lowest setting when using the aluminium tape reflectors. So instead I used the aluminium tape on just the initial reflection surface of the secondary reflection to get enough light across to the reflector on the other side but I left that reflection surface and the original reflection surface as just the white plastic as that seems sufficient for now.

Thanks! I wouldn't put too much stock in the edges in these comparisons as that's something I edit in post. Since I use transparent PNGs for the photos on my website by removing the background, I use an edge lighting diffuser to capture detail in the coin's edge otherwise it'll be entirely black and that doesn't look good on bright backgrounds. I then control the edge brightness in Photoshop using inner shadows to dial the brightness back down and add some natural fall-off. I actually forgot to use the edge diffuser on PA-2, which is probably why it seems darker, though I had to manually bring the brightness up before stacking so I could capture some of the detail that was there. The main problem is that bright edges look bad on dark backgrounds and dark edges look bad on bright backgrounds, so I have to try and strike a balance as it's not guaranteed my photos will always be against a dark background. I think this is something I can also control using CSS so I can have "dynamic edges", so to speak, depending on background, though that doesn't work for when I post my photos to other sites. For the photos above I just used a black background JPG to keep the file size smaller.

Part 3 Tests Time for some tests/examples. I'll start with an example shot using a proper axial light setup, i.e. with a piece of reflective glass between the lens and coin. And then I'll go through some "pseudo-axial" setups, starting with my current flash adapter, one of the new ones I made, and then a final design I've roughly settled on for now. Just to make sure we're on the same page when I discuss some particular areas below, the parts highlighted in red are my main focus. These seem to be the flattest areas of the design and areas where I want to try and capture some of the contours that are actually there but can appear flat in some lighting situations. Axial Lighting - First up is the pure axial lighting setup. There's great contrast around the designs, the toning is really brought out of the surface, and the focus areas mentioned above don't appear flat at all except for in small parts. The front leg of Baal for example is nicely rounded and the definition and depth can be seen in his chest as well as the lion's. The main negative is that the toning seems too much in places, such as the red, oranges, and blues on Baal's head, chest, and the lion's body. And as mentioned before, axial setups like this do reduce sharpness and detail, though it's practically unnoticeable unless zoomed in. Pseudo Axial 1 - This is using my current flash adapter, the one I've used for most of my photos. It's still a nice photo with great contrast around the figures and the toning is preserved but much of Baal, and parts of the lion, seem featureless and flat. Baal's chestand front leg in particular but also his arms, the lion's limbs, baal's head etc all are very flat. Pseudo Axial 2 - This one uses the black device in the bottom row 2nd from the left seen here. It uses two flashes positioned 180 degrees from each other, each reflecting light that should hit the coin at an 80 degree angle. For this photo they were positioned at 12 and 6 o'clock, i.e. top and bottom. Compared to Pseudo Axial 1 (PA1), we have less contrast around the figures but also less flatness. We get some definition back in Baal's legs and chest and the lion's shoulder, chest, and hind area represent the contours of the body just a bit better. We keep much of the toning but the surfaces of the obverse in particular look a bit more natural than in either the PA1 photo or the Axial Lighting photo. Pseudo Axial 3 - Finally we have what I think is the "winner". It's the black device in the bottom row at the far right in this photo, i.e. a single flash version of PA2. I believe this one balances the pros and cons of axial lighting best. It has the least amount of flatness out of any of the Pseudo-Axial examples while maintaining the toning and contrast. Compared to PA2, the lion has extra contrast on the underside as we're no longer lighting from that direction, only the 12 o'clock direction, but this results in much better depth being perceivable across the lion's trunk and limbs. The downside is mainly on the obverse where the axial effect struggles to make the surfaces pop near the bottom of the coin, as very little direct light can reach here and what light does likely bounces away from the lens. Nonetheless it's still possible to get a relatively evenly-lit photo while the majority of the reflected light is theoretically only targetting the top half of the coin. It can be difficult to see some of the nuanced differences from images side-by-side so the GIFs below alternate between two photos to make it a bit easier: AL1 vs PA3 PA1 vs PA3 PA2 vs PA3 If you made it this far, let me know which one you prefer! I think I'm on the right track with the last one (PA3) and have a few ideas for some improvements but feel free to send some ideas my way if anything occurs to you.

Ok continuing on from above... Part 2 Improving "Pseudo-Axial" As mentioned above, the issue with my pseudo-axial device was that it couldn't get approximately-axial light to hit the center of the coin because light could only come from around the coin in the flash adapter above, around where the lens sits, making it difficult to force light to cover the center of the coin ~75mm down below. One idea I toyed with a lot is directing the light to that particular spot using angled surfaces inside the flash adapter. For example, instead of having vertical walls inside the flash adapter, what if it was a 50 degree slope? If it were 45 degrees, it'd direct light axially towards the coin but the light would miss the coin entirely since the angle surfaces in the flash adapter can't be over the coin itself - so, we need a slightly wider angle to push the light towards the coin. The lines in blue show the light path coming horizontally from the flash head, reflecting off the 50 degree surface at 80 degrees relative to the axis of the light from the flash head, striking the nearly one whole half of a 30mm diameter coin placed 75mm away, and reflecting off of the coin at an 80 degree angle (relative to the coin's surface). 80 degrees isn't 90 degrees (i.e. axial lighting) but should be close enough! Importantly, with these distances and angles, the light reflected off of the coin still makes it back to the lens, it isn't too wide of an angle to miss the lens entirely. The only problem with this approach is that only light opposite the flash head is going to be reflected in this manner, meaning only half of the coin might receive that axial light. That makes the "ring light" design a bit superfluous if only the surfaces opposite the flash head are needed. The 50 degree slope would also be sharply curved around the adapter, throwing some of the reflections not towards the coin but in random directions away from the coin. Adapter with 50 degree curved interior surface: What this means is that the 50 degree slope may as well be flat and perpendicular to the flash head, not curved, to maximise the sloped surface area that can redirect light towards the coin. One could get rid of the "ring" and make it a box shape with the wall furthest from the flash a flat sloped surface but in my tests I took a different approach. Instead of mounting the flash horizontally, I instead mounted it under the camera at an angle and used a more minor sloped surface to reflect the light onto the coin. The New Design So this is the design I've been experimenting with the past week or two. It's essentially the same as above in terms of angles - the light hits the coin at an 80 degree angle and reflects off of it at an 80 degree angle. Using the geometry of the design, I can also block light that would not hit the coin (since most of my coins are about 30mm diameter or less), preventing any stray unwanted reflections that might happen if I allowed this light to be reflected. I tried various iterations of this design: one flash head, two flash heads, a box shape, a circular shape, two lights opposite each other, two lights at 45 or 60 degrees to each other, and then using black plastic for the everything except the reflecting surface I want light to bounce off. I don't know why I never thought about this before, though with my earlier designs I was encouraging *some* random light reflections so as to lessen the harsh contrast of pseudo-axial lighting. But these stray reflections were largely adding to the "flatness" problem I described earlier and I found that making the body black except the one surface I want reflections to come from made a huge difference to the flatness. You can see about half way through I started using black for parts of the body (as I ran out of white filament) and when I got around to doing a close comparison of the photos, I noticed ones from that body (3rd from the left, top row) were much better than any photos from the white body devices. Here's a comparison of how they differ in "flatness". The slightly yellow photo is from a white body, the greyer photo is from one of the black bodies with white only on the reflection surface. The area to pay attention to is around where the lion's front leg joins to its body - the shoulder joint and chest area. Note in the more yellow photo this area seems slightly flatter, while in the other photo you can get a hint of the contours of the lion's chest and shoulder joint. This is from the better control over the axial light and minimization of unwanted reflections. It's a subtle difference when viewed from afar but makes a big difference to the end result and I think it's something your brain subconsciously picks up on when trying to picture the relief of the design and the shapes of the features. I'll wrap up Part 2 here and come back later with a Part 3 comparing some final results on this coin. I suspect I'm not done experimenting just yet, and I'll need to test this on more coins, but so far I'm liking what I'm seeing.

I've been quiet here for awhile but have some updates to share for those interested. I've been growing a bit tired of my current lighting solutions for coin photography and wanted to tackle some of the problems I have with it. This will probably be a multi-part post and to adequately explain everything I have to start with an explanation of my current solution. Skip the sections on axial lighting if you're already familiar with that. Part 1 Goals and Axial Lighting My goals with lighting for coin photography are mainly reduced to: (a) recreate the axial lighting effect as close as possible, and (b) modify the lighting slightly to reduce the harshness of this effect while keeping its benefits. In other words, replicate axial lighting without the bad parts. Axial lighting is where the light hitting the object is parallel to the axis of the camera' lens, i.e. the light is hitting the object at a perpendicular (90 degree) angle, which by the law of reflection means the light reflecting back is also at 90 degrees and goes straight back to the camera. Axial lighting has several benefits: First, light hitting the coin perfectly perpendicularly (i.e. from straight-down) creates contrast by varying how much light is reflected to the camera based on the contours of the coin. The fields of the coin are mostly flat so they reflect most of the light back to the camera, producing bright fields that bring out the toning of the coin and features like flow lines and lustre. Parts of the coin with bumpy surfaces, like a portrait, reflect different amounts of light back. Flat areas like the cheek might reflect a lot of light, while the edges of the portrait reflect most light away because they are angled. This means the edges of the portrait are darker than the main parts of the portrait, creating contrast between the portrait and fields of the coin. However, the portrait is not uniformly bright, the slight variations in surface flatness reflect different amounts of light, slightly darkening contoured areas and accurately capturing the depth of the features. You can see an example of this in this axially-lit photo. Second, axial lighting provides consistency to your photos. You don't have to worry about getting the angle of the lighting just right or recreating the precise setup you used the previous weekend, instead it should be relatively easy to replicate the exact same lighting conditions. Third, axial lighting doesn't use shadows to create contrast and thus you don't risk losing detail due to insufficient light in some areas. Typically people use shadows to create contrast and depth in their coin photos by having the light at an angle relative to the coin. Some light will be blocked by the features of the coin, producing shadows on the opposite side of those features. This can make for inconsistent photos due to the shadows varying between coins and also you can obscure detail or make it hard to see by covering it in shadows. Axial lighting only produces the harshest shadows in areas that are parallel to the light source, almost everything else will reflect *some* light, it will just be less bright than other areas. Lastly, blown-out highlights are limited and easy to control. When using off-axis lighting from an angle, it's very easy to produce bright white areas on the tops of portraits. Axial lighting doesn't have this issue because it's much easier to evenly light the entire coin since each part of the coin is receiving the same amount of light. When you're lighting off-axis you often have to increase the light power to get parts of the coin furthest from the light to appear bright enough on the camera. Downsides of Axial lighting So, if axial lighting is so good, what's the problem? The main problem with axial lighting is getting the light to be axial to the lens. You can't put a light inside the lens itself, only around the lens. But if the light is around the lens and the coin is aligned with the center of the lens, how do you get axial light, surely the light can only hit the coin at an angle? This is exactly the problem. As mentioned before, the idea is to place a mirror or piece of glass between the lens and the coin at a 45 degree angle. You can then reflect horizontal light off of the glass, down onto the coin at a 90 degree angle, which then reflects back up towards the camera. There are two problems with this: (1) putting a piece of glass between the lens and coin introduces optical aberrations and defects. You lose sharpness, ability to resolve detail in the coin, and may have other optical issues like chromatic aberrations. (2) you need a lot of light. If your mirror reflects 50% light and transmits 50% light, when the light first hits the mirror you only have 50% of it being reflected to the coin, and when the light reflects off of the coin back to the camera, only 50% of that is transmitted through the mirror. This means only 25% of your original light actually makes it to the camera. Current solution To avoid these problems, I've been trying something called "pseudo-axial lighting", which means trying to get the light as axial as possible without using the mirror method above and avoiding the issues it introduces. My idea was to recreate a ring light except one powered by my flash. It would be mounted around the lens and try to reflect light down onto the coin at a slight angle, achieving most of the axial effect. The screenshots below of the 3D model are of my standard flash adapter. The green bit on the left is detachable and is where the Godox TT350 camera flash head is attached and held in place through friction. The grey object has a hole in the middle about 30mm in diameter, the other side of which has threaded adapters to mount to my camera' lens. The wide opening at the top is about 65mm in diameter and faces the coin. The third photo shows my "dual flash head" version of this so you can see how it is positioned relative to the coin. The goal is to get light from the flash down onto the coin at the highest angle possible - we want the light to hit the coin as if its coming from straight down, the idea being that the light then reflects straight up into the camera. The device below is not going to achieve this perfectly. Light comes in horizontally from the flash head and hits the grey cylinder, reflecting light in thousands of different directions, some of which will exit the cylinder and go towards the coin. One hopes that at least some of this light is hitting the coin roughly axial to the lens but a lot of light is not going to be, hence "pseudo-axial". Problems with this method The main problem with this method is the 30mm hole in the middle needed for the lens to see the coin. This hole means no light can be reflected from the flash head towards the center of the coin from this area. In practice that means more light is hitting areas around the coin then in the middle of the coin. What then happens is that you lose the axial effect in the middle of the coin and instead end up with diffused lighting that doesn't produce a lot of contrast in these areas or capture the depth of the features. You can see this in the following picture. Look at the side of Baal's leg, his himation, and the left part of his chest and face. Similarly on the lion pay attention to the main part of the lion's body. All of these areas look flat, they all have a similar amount of brightness so our eyes interpret that as meaning these features are all the same distance from our eyes, thus are perceived as flat and lacking depth. In aesthetic terms, I find that this can make the coin in general appear flat, lacking in contrast, and reducing the aesthetic quality of the coin. So how do you fix this? Really, there's no easy way. This solution requires a hole in the middle of the device so that the lens can see the coin but as long as that hole is there, you can't have light reflected it from it axially and the middle of the coin has a weakened axial effect. I have reduced the axial effect on purpose in this photo anyway, by using a second off-axis light source, but ideally you have full control over your lighting. The way to achieve this is by having as perfect of an axial lighting effect as possible and then dialling it back in certain areas in a controlled manner. Currently, I'm getting the axial effect in some areas of the coin but not in others (i.e. the center) and I have no control over that. I've iterated on this general design many times to try and mitigate the issue. You can see some of these designs below, which probably represent less than half that I've tried over the past 2-3 years. The main things I've tried are: (1) adding a second flash, hoping that it can light parts of the coin the first flash couldn't, (2) adding modifiers that attach on the outside to help direct light towards the center, and (3) adding modifiers on the inside like angled surfaces or "spouts" in the middle to help direct light towards the center. Some of these worked better than others but still aren't good enough in the end. Part 2 to come...

I think they are still die matches and what I find helpful in these tricky cases is to focus on the features that are very unlikely to be the same if they were not die matches. In this case, I consider that to be the position and distribution of the feathers on the body and around the head. What are the chances a die engraver gets these right on two different dies but flubs something else like the length of the claws? I'd say that's incredibly unlikely. I've highlighted both sets of feathers, using dots and lines, from the top example on a transparent layer and then superimposed that layer over the second example. As you can see, the position of the dots and lines is virtually identical, allowing for some minor perspective/parallax differences and wear. The only way that these will be identical and have other features mismatch (that are not explained by perspective, parallax, or wear/physical defects) is if the die was recut at some point or they used a die hub with the primary features to create two dies that they then retouched/modified slightly. The length of the claws can more easily be explained by deposits and wear making it difficult to discern the true outline of the claws as well as differences in perspective or parallax. I believe you also made a mistake in drawing those lines - you didn't insure the coins were rotated in the same position. So when you drew a line on the second example and dragged it to the top example, it was way off because the features of the top coin were rotated slightly relative to the bottom coin. If you overlay both coins and fix their relative rotation so the features match up, you can see just how far off your lines are due to the uncorrected rotation. After fixing the rotation and drawing a straight line starting from the edge of the claw up to the eye, I get virtually a perfect match between the two examples (allowing for some slight distortion from the photography and positioning of the coin on its surface): The A's position relative to the head feathers is tricky because on the first example it is so close to the edge of the flan that it is difficult to say what is part of the A and what is not, and also how much the A has been distorted by the increased wear it would receive from being on the very edge. I had a go at tracing the A of the top example and overlaying it on the bottom example. Note that I did not trace the A and then move it around to fit in the position of the second coin, rather I already had the two coins aligned, traced the A, turned off the layer for the top example, and would you believe it, the A is in the exact same position on the second coin with the same shape. There's a minor difference with the top leg of the top coin having a wider angle than is apparent on the bottom coin but I put this down to the fact that the A on the top coin is right on the edge and it has been deformed from wear and likely was never perfectly struck in the first place.

Granted this is not my area and I know next to nothing about the Eastern imitations but how sure are you that these are genuine? Just based on first impressions, I personally would stay clear of them but you undoubtedly have more knowledge in the area than I do. Have you found any other examples with similar obverses or reverses? Overlaying the two reverses, the feathers on the owl's body and around its head seem to be identical so I would say they're definitely die matches. When you say the 2nd coin has the olive branches meeting at a common mid-point, I believe you're just seeing the tip of the branch that comes after where the leaves actually meet on the branch, and that tip and the outline of the leaves visible does seem to line up with the first example. That second example you had sent to NGC is a much clearer fake, the first two I'd have just avoided based on first impressions, the fact that they seem to be of unknown origin and style, and as others have mentioned that they're a double die match. The toning and deposits also remind me of forgers who go to town trying to replicate find patina and silver oxide or silver chloride and end up making the coins look unnaturally toned but I've got nothing to back that up except gut feeling. edit: an attempt at fading in/out the reverses overlaid on each other:

I had a look through all the Alexander and Philip III drachm types dated up until 310 BC with uncrossed legs in PELLA and I didn't find a match. The obverse style has me a bit stumped, it looks familiar yet I didn't find a close match from another type. The reverse does seem to show Zeus with uncrossed legs and note how they are relatively parallel and stiff, as is the rest of his posture. This makes it easy to rule out a lot of the lifetime/early posthumous drachms from Asia Minor, which tend to depict Zeus with a wide spread-leg posture or with one leg angled behind the other slightly forming a lambda shape. The styles do change from type to type at times though so don't write off those mints wholesale. One issue with just looking by type in PELLA is that a single type can have quite different styles or even depict Zeus with both crossed and uncrossed legs so undoubtedly I missed some examples because the picture PELLA chose to represent the type didn't look close to yours. edit: just realised I left the image attached below, was meant to remove it. The reason I attached it was just to illustrate the stiff posture of Zeus on your coin as compared to similar postures on other coins, the one below is a tetradrachm from Babylon but a similar posture can be found on quite a few "Eastern" mints, particularly those around the Levant.

Will miss discussing Alexander The Great coins with him. He was always very friendly and I enjoyed bouncing ideas around with him or hearing his opinions on different aspects of Alexandrine coinage.

@Roerbakmix everyone has mentioned the main things already but I'd recommend following up with Simon to see if there's an easy way to get those listings from acsearch as they will almost have everything you need. You can use a little regex to try and extract the mint, weight, and diameter from the descriptions, it won't be perfect but you can probably get something that works in 90% of cases and you can manually check the remaining ones. The auction house and details will be in their own fields so no regex would be needed to extract those. Thanks for mentioning this Simon, I might contact you about that sometime!

One wonders how CNG listed that coin in good faith without mentioning the weight. If it's not a fourree, it'd have to be a forgery as it's severely underweight with no good reason to be. There are two in PELLA under Price 3403 that are between 14.86g and 15.36g but both are heavily corroded with significant delamination and I suspect at least one is also a fourree. Though as you say it may not be 3403 at all, though I don't think Price recorded any examples with OE.

Yeah I noticed that too so thought it was odd that they didn't try to then do this analysis with the full range of Series 138 coins. My understanding is that this chart only includes the coins of Series 138 that were not excluded from the catalogue. So the bulk of Series 138, the 204 coins excluded from the catalogue, aren't represented here and might show an even stronger pattern in the weight distribution. Though given so many of the examples that were included were still marked [!] for uncertain authenticity, it might be hard to even create a small control group of Series 138 by which to test the hypothesis. For example, if there were Series 138 examples of known authenticity in high grades, it might be possible to detect a difference between those and the weights of the suspected fakes. Even then, though, one suspects is that the difference in average weight wouldn't be so great as to be a useful indicator for individual examples, rather just as a characteristic of the fakes.

Thanks for sharing! I've had a bit of a read through to see what it had to say about the IBSCC condemned forgeries as they used transfer dies so it's difficult to know if examples sold with the same dies are fake or not. Seems like the author was also a bit unsure and excluded many of the examples with that die paring (series 138 in the catalogue). In a footnote on page 31 about the 320 examples they excluded from their catalogue they say: "The remaining 293 coins, mostly from the market and belonging to series 138 (204 specimens), were excluded from the catalog because of ambiguous authenticity." I always figured that older examples with this die paring, say from pre 1950, would be OK but they mark many of these with [!], indicating that they're unsure about their authenticity as well. I would've thought that with so many examples one would be able to identify some clues that indicate which of these examples are from the transfer dies and which are not (e.g. based on weight distribution, diverging die deterioration etc) but perhaps not. Wonder how the IBSCC team identified them. If one is in the market for these tetradrachms, sounds like it's best to avoid Series 138 all together. Though it makes you wonder how many other excellent forgeries of this quality are out there for other types but remain undetected.

I noticed the lot doesn't seem to have the usual "changelog" that you can find on biddr when lots have been updated but as the owner of the platform I guess you have your own ways of finding out if and when it changed 😅

Appreciate you tabulating the data, even if as you say it may not be conclusive, it's refreshing to see some data in this discussion! Auction House L - is it possible, assuming they are shillbidding, that they purposefully bid one increment below the max so as not to arouse suspicion? Including max bids and within 1 increment bids, that would put L at 63%, R at 59%, A at 44%, and S at 15%. That being said, I feel auction houses L and R are perhaps the most competitive (less so for R these days) so that might go someway to explaining the pattern. Anyway, here's my data for "L". The ones I've won at my max I've felt are fair prices so for my data I don't think it's too suspicious. At max: 4 1 Increment: 1 2 Increments: 4 >2 Increments: 1

My point wasn't that other platforms had other T&Cs for Vinchon's auction, my point was that it may not be Vinchon's fault that Numisbids had the wrong T&Cs. The question is whether Vinchon is responsible for ensuring that their T&Cs on Numisbids are updated and accurate, or is that Numisbids' responsibility? If the former, there's a good argument for Edessa sticking to the terms that Vinchon has on Numisbids and arguing Vinchon needs to sort out shipping for them (at buyer's cost, of course). If the latter, then the mistake is with Numisbids and Edessa's complaint is then with Numisbids, not Vinchon. Naturally, Numisbids' own T&Cs absolve it of any liability (in words at least, not necessarily in law) so that would essentially mean Edessa is out of luck if the fault is with Numisbids. I have no clue how the relationship between Numisbids and auction houses actually work so the above is just a hypothetical. I just wanted to point out that it may not necessarily be Vinchon's fault that the T&Cs on Numisbids are out dated and that it's best to bid with the official platform the auction house is using rather than an intermediary to ensure you're getting the most accurate information possible.

"But the customer to arrange the shipping process? This is absurd" - it's actually fairly common among art and antiquities auction houses but as to the confusing terms it probably depends on whose responsibility it was for updating the terms in Numisbids. If it's Vinchon's responsibility, I think there's a decent argument that Edessa can stick to his guns and ask for Vinchon to complete the shipping on their behalf and just charge them the resulting amount. If it's Numisbids' responsibility, however, then Edessa likely has no choice and has to abide by the sale terms as listed on Drouot or one of the other live platforms used. Though even if Vinchon agrees to handle the shipping, which is something these auction houses will sometimes offer anyway, all they're going to do is call up MBE etc or The Packengers and charge you the same amount it would cost if you had called them up for a quote. So you don't save any money, you just don't need to deal with the middle-man.

Yep that's what you need to do. This is why you always need to read the terms and conditions before bidding, particularly for French auction houses as they are typically known for not doing in-house shipping. It sucks and is expensive but the auction house can't be faulted if it's in their terms. It's best not to use Numisbids but to bid at the primary platform the auction house is using and to read the sale terms on that platform. This sale was on Drouot I believe and usually Drouot says on the lot page "shipping via X is quoted at Y price" and then a note saying you can also choose a different provider if you wish. That makes it much clearer than Numisbids that you have to arrange shipping yourself. I believe Vinchon uses Phidas to run the auction and it's then hosted on several platforms like Drouot. The auction that took place the following day was then run by Osenat it seems, hence the various names popping up in the terms and invoices etc. All a bit confusing but also not surprising when it comes to the French auction houses. In my experience, auction houses typically waive the storage fees if you pay on time, the item is small, and you tell them when you will arrange for it to be collected. I've had auction houses keep my items for a month or two this way without incurring the storage fee.

I think Leu having such large auctions can be a curse in at least two respects: (1) I don't even bother checking sections of coins that I would otherwise because there's simply too many, and (2) I usually have much larger watchlists than at any other auction but my budget remains the same. I spoke about this the other week on the Discord server: for a collector like me, I'm not saving up 3 months of budget just because the Leu auction is 3x larger than any other. I go in with the same budget that I would for any other auction, with a focus to buy maybe 1-2 coins of my targets if possible. The difference is that I may have 40 coins on my watchlist instead of 15 but I'm still only walking away with 1 or 2 at most. If Leu split their auctions over 3 months, there's a much higher chance I'd be buying more coins from them. By throwing all of their coins in one auction, Leu aren't competing for my budget in Month 1 or Month 2, only in Month 3. In Month 1 & 2, all the other auction houses like CNG, Roma, Savoca, Naumann, Nomos etc have free reign on my budget as there's no Leu auction to compete. When it comes to Month 3, Leu may be more likely to get my money in that month than the other auction houses because I have more targets with them but they're limiting themselves to getting only 1 month's worth of my budget, while every other auction house with monthly auctions is competing for 3 months worth. Though that's just me and how I try to budget my collecting, I know that for many others the scenario above wouldn't apply to them at all.

"I hope, and still remain cordial here!" So far, you've called transgender people or their identity: pernicious, delusional, confused, and suffering of some form of an affliction.