Coin collecting, a journey and world view

[robinjojo]

It's Sunday afternoon and the sun has finally broken though for a pleasant spring day in the the South Bay.  With the sunshine sometimes my mind starts to grind its old worn gears, and I begin to think.  The thought today is both retrospective and introspective.  How have the coins that I've collected gong back to the late 1970s informed my world view today?  How does the act of collecting affect the understanding of history, and how does that understanding influence one's values?

I first began collecting exclusively US coins, specifically Morgan and Peace dollars. This, I think, was a natural outgrowth of my childhood's experience helping my dad with counting coins gleaned from his jukebox locations in Detroit.  All the coins were quarters and dimes as I recall, all silver back then.  My first Morgan dollar came from a coin shop in Dearborn, Michigan.  Moving out to California in 1979 the collecting continued with Morgan dollars by variety, based on Wayne Miller's book.  Collecting these coins, from the 1878 to 1904 and Peace dollars from 1921 to 1935 fueled my interest US history of the late 19th and the first half of 20th century, specifically the Civil War, Reconstruction, the populist "free silver" movement, the Grange Movement, the economic crises of 1873, 1893 and 1907 and the emergence of the labor movement to name a few.  I came to understand the dynamics that create conflict, repression and unfettered exploitation.  The roots of that understanding underpin much of what I think today.

United States, Morgan dollar, 1884, Carson City (CC).

Nothing is truly permanent and this is particularly true with coin collecting interests.  Morgan and Peace dollar collecting have limitations, really a matter of grade and variety.  For more variety I moved to world coins in the early 1980s.  I also began collecting ancients.  The Durants' seminal volumes on the history of civilization helped fuel this interest.  I concentrated primary on crowns and tetradrachms for both their beauty and artistic merits.  I particularly focused at the time on the 30 Years War, the coinage of the Spanish Empire, the coinage of the Sudan under the Mahdi and his successor, and the coinage of the Mexican Revolution of 1909 to 1921.  I became informed of the roles of the developing nation states, the development of what is now global commerce, and the fundamental human characteristic to resist oppression in its manifest forms. The collecting of the Sudanese coins informed me of earlier messianic uprisings.

France, Louis XIV, Écu of three crowns, Rennes (9), 1711.

 

Sudan, AR 20 piastres, AH 1310 (1893), Omdurman, Kalifa Abudullah.

KM 15

24.2 grams

By the 2010's I decided to basically concentrate on ancient coinage, with a focus on Athens, but other areas as well, especially Byzantine folles.  During this time I began to read works, fiction and nonfiction, on Athenian and Byzantine history.  I came to understand how democracy bestows rights for people, albeit for a very restricted portion of the Athenian populace, and how it can sow the seeds for its own destruction.  I also learned how empires form and collapse, and how the synergistic dynamics, often fueled by personal ambition, of an empire or a nation often drive it to rash foreign actions, such as the Athenian invasion of Sicily and Syracuse in the later 5th century BC, with disastrous consequences.  This is a constant thread throughout history and be seen in action to this day. 

Athens, archaic owl, class C, 482 - 480 BC

17.4 grams

 

Syracuse, AE 29 litra, 344-336 BC.

Roman Empire, Augustus and Agrippa, AE As, Nemausus, Gaul. c. AD 10-14.

12.02 grams

 

Byzantine (Eastern Roman) Empire, Constantine IV, AE follis, Constantinople, 668-685 AD.

16.41 grams

 

How has collecting in your field or fields of interest informed you?  Has collecting followed your interests or vice versa?

 

Edited June 11, 2023 by robinjojo

[Nerosmyfavorite68]

That's an interesting writeup and great coins.  You have one of my bucket list coins, a large Constantine IV follis!  I almost got one, but the dealer couldn't find it.  It's just as well, the post office mauled the package, but the other coin in the order - the tiny coin managed to survive.  The large one would have been toast.

I'm struggling with trying to restore the backup of a bad drive, so I don't have much time to type.  I guess one would say that collecting has mostly followed my interests.  I started out with Roman and Byzantine, and Seleucid shortly after that. I've since branched out to Sasanian, Bactrian, and pretty much any coin which is cool.  Some things haven't changed; I'm still not into LRB's.

My buys tend to follow themes, but they can quickly change and bounce around.

[ewomack]

Coins have nearly always provided a (potentially illusory) connection to the actual past that I'm currently studying. In the vast majority of cases, the history comes first and the coins come second. In other words, I could enjoy the history perfectly well without coins, but coins usually enhance the learning.

I honestly don't know why I began collecting coins, but it all started in the back of a vacuum cleaner shop in the town adjacent to where my parents still live. This shop, for reasons that I never fully understood, sold coins in a back room. Somehow, I found my way back there and began collecting very worn, but fully dated, Liberty Head Nickels. I still have them all. Though I probably was 10 years old or younger at the time, the idea of owning something that old apparently appealed to me. Perhaps this represented my first "connection to the past" revelation? If nothing else, it made me realize, in a real and concrete way, that history actually existed and that people used money back in the 1880s. Put another way, the people of the past were at least a little bit like me. It made the past seem more tangible and alive. Then I went through the usual collector's gamut of buying mint sets, looking through change, etc., that now seems more like hoarding than collecting. I wanted everything, but my limited child's income kept the most interesting things at bay. I read coin magazines and fantasized about owning gold specimens. Then I put all of my coins in a box in a closet and stopped collecting for years.

A number of life changes, including becoming an adult and finally possessing my own income, materialized and I found that I had really neglected British history. As I read and learned the monarchs and the notable events, "1066 and all that," I began to wonder what British coins looked like. I imagined that they probably all sat in museums, way too expensive and unattainable for someone like myself. A quick Internet search brought coins flooding back into my life in an astonished flurry. I, that is, me, could actually own coins of Elizabeth I, of Henry VIII, of Edward VI, and even Edward I and earlier medieval monarchs. I couldn't believe it. I sat scrolling the screen and gazing at the coins dating back 1,000 years that just sat there waiting to get purchased. Of course, I bought some. To start, I bought this cheaper 1565 Elizabeth I three pence as a "test." It isn't a great example, but it pushed my collection back a few centuries and led to further acquisitions.

I found that learning a nation's coins led to a quick way of learning the sequence of its overall history. The changing British monarchs only came into focus for me after studying British coins. Spink's "Coins of England" not only taught me about British coins, but about British history itself. It made learning long lineages pretty easy. I repeated the experiment with France. "Les monnaies royales françaises 987-1793" provided a path through French coinage and royal history. Being completely in French, it also helped with vocabulary and language learning. Then on to Japan, which again came alive with books on coins (and paper money) and history. This led to the discovery of one of my favorite coin series of all time, the Meiji dragons.

My interests moved slowly backwards in time. I began exploring other medieval coinage and found that I simply enjoyed their aesthetics without really knowing their accompanying history. Of course an interest in Rome emerged and I bought some cheap and rough examples, now fascinated that I held a piece of metal over 1,000 years old. Not surprisingly, I studied Roman history, watched documentaries, read books, everything. I truly enjoyed reading Marcus Aurelius's "Meditations" with one of his coins sitting close by. I know I've shared this one many times already, but it remains one of my favorites.

It didn't take long to move back to Greece, to the beginnings of coinage itself. I only have one Greek coin so far, but I love it.

This led me to my latest craze, Byzantine coins. I began just loving their rough and abstract aesthetics, situated somewhere between Rome and medieval times. I knew nearly nothing about Byzantium at all, but, in a complete turnaround in my collecting methodology, I started with coins and then learned history. In this case, coins led me to study history and not vice versa.

Coins have provided an enjoyable and easy way to learn about world history. They give structure to large narratives that in text form may prove difficult to retain. Perhaps the more visually oriented should look to them for help in history learning? Not only that, as one of the earliest forms of mass communication, coins also express the values (via propaganda or other means) of cultures and societies. They provide symbols of power for rulers and ruling classes that also help give authenticity to economic exchanges. They must have also provided a sense of unity for cultures that once used coins of specific types, though many types probably circulated at once in any given time period. Much like the coins I collected in change, they can give a sense of identity (sometimes for better or worse) for people living in an area of the world. Given all of this, I believe that coins likely provided a similar experience for people of the past that I had while growing up. I bought things with coins, studied their surfaces, and wondered at the ability they had to help me obtain objects of desire (sports cards, model paint, candy, magazines, etc). People in the past must have felt something similar when seeing a coin, studying it, and using it. In this way I feel a connection to the people of the past through coins. I'm doing what they likely did, though I can never completely identify with their lives, just as much as they would probably never be able to identify with mine. Also, presuming that my coins are genuine (I think they are), they were actually there, "alive" in history. People from the past touched them. Someone had to make them by hand. They somehow made it through all of the fuss to the present day.

That's how coins have informed me, enriched my education, and made me feel some level of kinship and unity with those who came before me. That's some pretty awesome powers for tiny chunks of punched metal.

 

Edited June 11, 2023 by ewomack

[Al Kowsky]

2 hours ago, robinjojo said:

It's Sunday afternoon and the sun has finally broken though for a pleasant spring day in the the South Bay.  With the sunshine sometimes my mind starts to grind its old worn gears, and I begin to think.  The thought today is both retrospective and introspective.  How have the coins that I've collected gong back to the late 1970s informed my world view today?  How does the act of collecting affect the understanding of history, and how does that understanding influence one's values?

I first began collecting exclusively US coins, specifically Morgan and Peace dollars. This, I think, was a natural outgrowth of my childhood's experience helping my dad with counting coins gleaned from his jukebox locations in Detroit.  All the coins were quarters and dimes as I recall, all silver back then.  My first Morgan dollar came from a coin shop in Dearborn, Michigan.  Moving out to California in 1979 the collecting continued with Morgan dollars by variety, based on Wayne Miller's book.  Collecting these coins, from the 1878 to 1904 and Peace dollars from 1921 to 1935 fueled my interest US history of the late 19th and the first half of 20th century, specifically the Civil War, Reconstruction, the populist "free silver" movement, the Grange Movement, the economic crises of 1873, 1893 and 1907 and the emergence of the labor movement to name a few.  I came to understand the dynamics that create conflict, repression and unfettered exploitation.  The roots of that understanding underpin much of what I think today.

United States, Morgan dollar, 1884, Carson City (CC).

Nothing is truly permanent and this is particularly true with coin collecting interests.  Morgan and Peace dollar collecting have limitations, really a matter of grade and variety.  For more variety I moved to world coins in the early 1980s.  I also began collecting ancients.  The Durants' seminal volumes on the history of civilization helped fuel this interest.  I concentrated primary on crowns and tetradrachms for both their beauty and artistic merits.  I particularly focused at the time on the 30 Years War, the coinage of the Spanish Empire, the coinage of the Sudan under the Mahdi and his successor, and the coinage of the Mexican Revolution of 1909 to 1921.  I became informed of the roles of the developing nation states, the development of what is now global commerce, and the fundamental human characteristic to resist oppression in its manifest forms. The collecting of the Sudanese coins informed me of earlier messianic uprisings.

France, Louis XIV, Écu of three crowns, Rennes (9), 1711.

 

Sudan, AR 20 piastres, AH 1310 (1893), Omdurman, Kalifa Abudullah.

KM 15

24.2 grams

By the 2010's I decided to basically concentrate on ancient coinage, with a focus on Athens, but other areas as well, especially Byzantine folles.  During this time I began to read works, fiction and nonfiction, on Athenian and Byzantine history.  I came to understand how democracy bestows rights for people, albeit for a very restricted portion of the Athenian populace, and how it can sow the seeds for its own destruction.  I also learned how empires form and collapse, and how the synergistic dynamics, often fueled by personal ambition, of an empire or a nation often drive it to rash foreign actions, such as the Athenian invasion of Sicily and Syracuse in the later 5th century BC, with disastrous consequences.  This is a constant thread throughout history and be seen in action to this day. 

Athens, archaic owl, class C, 482 - 480 BC

17.4 grams

 

Syracuse, AE 29 litra, 344-336 BC.

Roman Empire, Augustus and Agrippa, AE As, Nemausus, Gaul. c. AD 10-14.

12.02 grams

 

Byzantine (Eastern Roman) Empire, Constantine IV, AE follis, Constantinople, 668-685 AD.

16.41 grams

 

How has collecting in your field or fields of interest informed you?  Has collecting followed your interests or vice versa?

 

Great presentation & lovely coins 🤩. I hope all the newbies see this thread 😊.

[Al Kowsky]

6 minutes ago, ewomack said:

Coins have nearly always provided a (potentially illusory) connection to the actual past that I'm currently studying. In the vast majority of cases, the history comes first and the coins come second. In other words, I could enjoy the history perfectly well without coins, but coins usually enhance the learning.

I honestly don't know why I began collecting coins, but it all started in the back of a vacuum cleaner shop in the town adjacent to where my parents still live. This shop, for reasons that I never fully understood, sold coins in a back room. Somehow, I found my way back there and began collecting very worn, but fully dated, Liberty Head Nickels. I still have them all. Though I probably was 10 years old or younger at the time, the idea of owning something that old apparently appealed to me. Perhaps this represented my first "connection to the past" revelation? If nothing else, it made me realize, in a real and concrete way, that history actually existed and that people used money back in the 1880s. Put another way, the people of the past were at least a little bit like me. It made the past seem more tangible and alive. Then I went through the usual collector's gamut of buying mint sets, looking through change, etc., that now seems more like hoarding than collecting. I wanted everything, but my limited child's income kept the most interesting things at bay. I read coin magazines and fantasized about owning gold specimens. Then I put all of my coins in a box in a closet and stopped collecting for years.

A number of life changes, including becoming an adult and finally possessing my own income, materialized and I found that I had really neglected British history. As I read and learned the monarchs and the notable events, "1066 and all that," I began to wonder what British coins looked like. I imagined that they probably all sat in museums, way too expensive and unattainable for someone like myself. A quick Internet search brought coins flooding back into my life in an astonished flood. I, that is, me, could actually own coins of Elizabeth I, of Henry VIII, of Edward VI, and even Edward I and earlier medieval monarchs. I couldn't believe it. I sat scrolling the screen and gazing at the coins dating back 1,000 years that just say there waiting to get purchased. Of course I bought some. To start, I bought this cheaper 1565 Elizabeth I three pence as a "test." It isn't a great example, but it pushed my collection back a few centuries and led to further acquisitions.

I found that learning a nation's coins led to a quick way of learning the sequence of its overall history. The changing British monarchs only came into focus for me after studying British coins. Spink's "Coins of England" not only taught me about British coins, but about British history itself. It made learning long lineages pretty easy. I repeated the experiment with France. "Les monnaies royales françaises 987-1793" provided a path through French coinage and royal history. Being completely in French, it also helped with vocabulary and language learning. Then on to Japan, which again came alive with books on coins (and paper money) and history. This led to the discovery of one of my favorite coin series of all time, the Meiji dragons.

My interests moved slowly backwards in time. I began exploring other medieval coinage and found that I simply enjoyed their aesthetics without really knowing their accompanying history. Of course an interest in Rome emerged and I bought some cheap and rough examples, now fascinated that I held a piece of metal over 1,000 years old. Not surprisingly, I studied Roman history, watched documentaries, read books, everything. I truly enjoyed reading Marcus Aurelius's "Meditations" with one of his coins sitting close by. I know I've shared this one many times already, but it remains one of my favorites.

It didn't take long to move back to Greece, to the beginnings of coinage itself. I only have one Greek coin so far, but I love it.

This led me to my latest craze, Byzantine coins. I began just loving their rough and abstract aesthetics, situated somewhere between Rome and medieval times. I knew nearly nothing about Byzantium at all, but, in a complete turnaround in my collecting methodology, I started with coins and then learned history. In this case, coins led me to study history and not vice versa.

Coins have provided an enjoyable and easy way to learn about world history. They give structure to large narratives that in text form may prove difficult to retain. Perhaps the more visually oriented should look to them for help in history learning? Not only that, as one of the earliest forms of mass communication, coins also express the values (via propaganda or other means) of cultures and societies. They provide symbols of power for rulers and ruling classes that also help give authenticity to economic exchanges. They must have also provided a sense of unity for cultures that once used coins of specific types, though many types probably circulated at once in any given time period. Much like the coins I collected in change, they can give a sense of identity (sometimes for better or worse) for people living in an area of the world. Given all of this, I believe that coins likely provided a similar experience for people of the past that I had while growing up. I bought things with coins, studied their surfaces, and wondered at the ability they had to help me obtain objects of desire (sports cards, model paint, candy, magazines, etc). People in the past must have felt something similar when seeing a coin, studying it, and using it. In this way I feel a connection to the people of the past. I'm doing what they likely did, though I can never completely identify with their lives, just as much as they would probably never be able to identify with mine. Also, presuming that my coins are genuine (I think they are) they were actually there, "alive" in history. People from the past touched them. Someone had to make them by hand. They somehow made it through all of the fuss to the present day.

That's how coins have informed me, enriched my education, and made me feel some level of kinship and unity with those who came before me. That's some pretty awesome powers for tiny chunks of punched metal.

Another great presentation with wonderful coins too 😊!

[robinjojo]

41 minutes ago, Nerosmyfavorite68 said:

That's an interesting writeup and great coins.  You have one of my bucket list coins, a large Constantine IV follis!  I almost got one, but the dealer couldn't find it.  It's just as well, the post office mauled the package, but the other coin in the order - the tiny coin managed to survive.  The large one would have been toast.

I'm struggling with trying to restore the backup of a bad drive, so I don't have much time to type.  I guess one would say that collecting has mostly followed my interests.  I started out with Roman and Byzantine, and Seleucid shortly after that. I've since branched out to Sasanian, Bactrian, and pretty much any coin which is cool.  Some things haven't changed; I'm still not into LRB's.

My buys tend to follow themes, but they can quickly change and bounce around.

That was a good outcome.  Those sorting machines at the post office can be package shredders at times.

I noticed that a large follis of Constantine IV, in AVF, sold at the CNG e-auction 539 for $400, plus 20% buyer's fee.

Here's a link to that lot:

https://auctions.cngcoins.com/lots/view/4-9TK3MI/constantine-iv-pogonatus-with-heraclius-and-tiberius-668-685-follis-33mm-1981-g-7h-constantinople-mint-1st-officina-struck-674-681-near-vf

They do show up now and then, but it is pretty rare.  I think the $400 hammer price was a pretty good purchase for someone.

 

[sand]

For me, it's a virtuous cycle. My interest in history, feeds my interest in coins, and vice versa. I'm interested in history, and I like coins. I've liked coins, since I was a child. My parents had a purse or something similar, which was full of old Lincoln pennies. I remember playing with the pennies, stacking them, and pretending they were gold, and pretending I was rich. When I was a child, in the 1970s, I collected US coins and world coins, mostly US coins. I had a good book about US coins, and I used to read it often. It was good, because it talked a lot, about the history surrounding the coins, such as US colonial times, the California gold rush, the Nevada silver rush, and the sutters selling what they called "pie". I wish I could remember the title and author of that book. It seems like, I learned more US history from that US coin book, than I did from US history books. Here are some of my favorite US coins, in my collection. An 1878 trade dollar, a 1798 draped bust large cent, an 1851 large cent, an 1864 2 cent piece, a silver 3 cent piece, a nickel 3 cent piece, and an Indian head cent.

Then, I stopped collecting coins, and started collecting postage stamps. Then, I stopped collecting postage stamps. Then, 30 years later in 2009, I started collecting bullion coins. Soon after that, I started collecting US coins again, and English copper pennies. Then, in 2013, I stopped collecting coins, again. Then, in 2018, I started collecting US coins, again. Also in 2018, I started collecting ancient coins and medieval coins. As a child, I was interested in the rise and fall of the Roman Empire, and the Dark Ages. And, as a child, I was fascinated by a Byzantine exhibit in a museum. Nowadays, I'm sort of a generalist. I collect many areas of ancient, medieval, and modern coins.

How has collecting coins affected my world view? Collecting coins has made me more interested in history. Perhaps, one can learn a lot from history, even though "history is written by the winners". When I look at old coins, I feel the presence of people long dead. I wonder, where are they now? Where will we be, 2000 years from now? Are we doomed, to descend, into the sand? Or, is there something more? What waits for us, in the sand?

Edited June 12, 2023 by sand