What is the future for ancient numismatics?

[Rand]

In the 1967 article, 'The first gold issue of Anastasius' (ANS, Museum notes. 1967;13:119-21), Joan Fagerlie lists 8 known solidi of 491-492 PERP Anastasius types, all imperial. No Western types, semisses, or tremisses were included (museums and private collections had a small number). Today, 56 years later, I am aware of 138 such coins. In 2023 alone, 13 new such coins appeared on the market (good news for me).

 

Roma Numismatics Limited. Auction 28. 05/07/2023

 

A quick search for 'aureus' and 'tetradrachm' in ACSearch.info shows the following trends starting from 2010. It is not precise, includes a few other coins, and needs to account for the increasing popularity of online platforms. Still, the number of coins on the market has increased dramatically.

Despite multiple announcements of museum collections expanding, the scale of museum depositions seems relatively small. 

I have seen multiple examples of rare coins no longer being so rare.
The trends for lower-cost coins on the market are harder to estimate, but they may see a particularly high increase. High-value Greek and Roman rarities were more likely to reach collections and museums for centuries, while many less valuable, more common coins ended up in the melting pot until more recently. 

Can the numismatic market become overwhelmed with supply and follow the stamp market decline in the lower-end segment?

Antiques ownership's political and legal pressure might also influence the market unpredictably. What do you think about the future of numismatics?

[zadie]

This is an interesting topic! I did my own tinkering and tried to replicate the number of aureii that have been sold in 2023. Like you mentioned, I noticed a lot of the results were actually neither Roman nor Aureii so I modified my search query slightly and just added more keywords to exclude non-aureii that I found along the way: aureus "ric" "AV" -"fourree" -"ducato" -"venezia" -"zecche" -"dinar" -"imitation" -"medieval" -"dobla" -"denarius" -"denier" -"CAROLUS" -"denar". Using this (also flawed) method, I was able to count 1185 Roman Aureii sold in 2023. I think a fair amount of those will also be represented in previous years, as they are not all new finds. 

[Cordoba]

similar thing happened with baktrians. This is a chart from Glenn's Money and Power in Hellenistic Baktria, showing how many of a certain type of Antimachos tets pop up each year. before the 1990's it was pretty rare, but now a relatively common type. 

More recently, a hoard of baktrians popped up around 2019. plato tetradrachms, while still very rare, have came to auction much more often than it did before 2019. 

[Rand]

An Aurei plot based on @zadie search criteria. It excludes many non-Aurei and misses a few Aurei. However, the message was not the absolute coin numbers (which are not accurate) - the message is that the number of coins on the market is increasing. 

 

[DonnaML]

Very interesting charts. I suppose the numbers should be slightly discounted to account for coins sold more than once during the same calendar year.  It's difficult to draw any conclusions about the effect on prices of the increased supply of tetradrachms, given the wide variety of coins covered by that term (everything from Attic owls to inexpensive billon tetradrachms from 3rd-century Roman Alexandria). But have you noticed any material decrease in prices for Roman aurei resulting from the increased numbers on the market -- double or even triple what they were a dozen years ago? I haven't. There still seems to be enough demand to absorb the supply without any price reductions. One can still buy a 4th-century solidus in decent condition for $1,500 or less. But I have yet to see an aureus sell for less than $3,000-$4,000, and the lower end of that range seems to be largely occupied with Nero aurei in less than mediocre condition. 

[Rand]

Interesting points @DonnaML. 

No, I did not notice a decrease in prices for Roman aurei. Overall, aurei are still relatively few, desirable and upper market, which tends to be stable. This may change if the supply continue to increase.

It would be too time-consuming to analyse price trends for many coins, which must account for the coin condition and rarity of individual types. If you have several more common aurei types in mind, I can specifically check the trends by condition, which would be interesting.

For the common solidi of Anastasius, which I follow more closely, the prices are relatively stable with some increase. However, the price increase is behind the inflation. I would not be able to resell most of my coins to recover what I paid, accounting for inflation, even without seller fees.

 

[sand]

It's an interesting topic. I'm no expert on this subject. Here are some of my thoughts. Perhaps, the invention of the internet, and what seems to have been an increase in the number of persons in the world who have the time and money to collect ancient coins, and the COVID-19 pandemic resulting in more people stuck in their houses and looking for things to do and buy, have resulted in an increase in the number of ancient coin collectors. Therefore, perhaps there has been a large increase in the demand for ancient coins. Perhaps the seeming increase in demand, has kept pace with the seeming increase in supply. Perhaps the increase in supply, has been caused by an increase in available metal detectors, which has perhaps resulted in an increase in the number of hoards found. Also, as demand seems to have increased, and as the prices seem to have increased, perhaps the number of persons searching for coin hoards with metal detectors has increased, because there is more motivation to search for coin hoards with metal detectors. In a way, the ancient coin market, seems similar to the oil market. As the demand increases, and as the price increases, the supply increases. "They aren't making any more ancient coins", some people say. "They aren't making any more oil", some people say. And yet, as technology has improved, people seem to have gotten better, at finding both ancient coins, and oil. And, both ancient coins and oil, are being threatened by the possibility of government laws against them. Therefore, you never know. Perhaps someday, both will be illegal. Will ancient coins eventually become illegal to own? I don't know. There are so many ancient coins. How can the government stop them all? And yet, perhaps it will eventually become a black market. The US government made the ownership of significant amounts of gold illegal, from 1933 to 1974. However, it seems like, fewer people know or care about ancient coins, compared to the number of people who know or care about gold. However, the number of people who know or care about the value of gold, seems to have decreased, since 1933. Oh well. Those are just some of my thoughts, at the moment.

Edited December 16, 2023 by sand

[Coinmaster]

Metal detecting is definitely the cause for increasing amount of coins. But because of aging of the population in several continents and because of internet and inflation, I don't see prices dropping for the next say 20-30 years. After this however, who knows? Perhaps the digitalization of money cause more people to care less about coins in general. But than again, this will take a while.

[Heliodromus]

It's hard to know how to interpret, or tease apart, a trend like that, since it's the result of multiple factors.

1) Freshly discovered coin supply, which I'd guess has peaked in terms of number of finds per year (since metal detectors have already been around long enough for the easy stuff to have been found), but would be interesting to see what stats are available to support/refute that. Even if this is generally the case, some of the rumored recent massive finds (30,000 owls!) must distort the supply for multiple years. I wonder how changing laws or other factors continue to affect this too, as had been the case with the breakup of Yugoslavia and ensuing hardship and lawlessness that caused a surge of detecting and new finds.

2) The rate at which coins already in collections and investment accounts are circulating, and the changing mix of long term collecting vs short term "investing" and flipping. Inflation, both in general, and in terms of coin prices must factor into this, with rising prices enouraging people to speculate and sell.

3) Changing laws which are attempting to at least suppress the movement of coins across borders. It's not obvious whether this is having much or any affect on level of sales though.

The internet and social media (FaceBook, Reddit, etc) seem to continue to attract new people to the hobby, and rising prices over last 20 years are presumably at least partly a reflection of that. As long as it remains possible to easily buy ancients at affordable prices, then I would assume the hobby will continue to grow. OTOH, it's not obvious how much the hobby depends on fresh supply - what would it look like if that dried up and the market only consisted of existing collections getting periodically resold?

 

 

[John Conduitt]

There might be a bias in the numbers to do with how many are offered in online auctions and how often (and on acsearch) now compared to 2010. The metal detector has increased finds hugely since the 1970s, so it would be odd for numbers to double since 2010, let alone be 4 or 5 times. There’s likely to be more flipping and less sold offline.

The answer to the question will relate to how many more are still in the ground. I think there will be collectors to buy a lot more, as the number of people well-off enough to collect will keep going up.

[DonnaML]

I suppose there's no way to estimate how the numbers of ancient coins sold at retail have changed in the last dozen years -- whether in person at stores and coin shows or online, and, for online sales, whether on VCoins, MAShops, ebay, or individual dealers' websites. Or to figure out whether there has been any corresponding decline in retail sales as auction sales have increased. I would guess, without any concrete evidence, that there's been a decrease in the number of genuine ancient coins sold on ebay over the last dozen -- and over the last 20 -- years, as ebay has been increasingly flooded with fakes and a lot of collectors have decided to stay away from it.

[Heliodromus]

There have certainly been, and continue to be, large scale changes in where coins are sold. 20 or so years ago there were still many individual coin dealer websites (which itself was something new from pre-internet mail order lists), then most those all got consolidated into VCoins and MA Shops. When I started 20 years ago Yahoo! was almost as popular for ancients as eBay, which then exploded in popularity (esp. for LRBS) with the breakup of Yugoslavia and those coins finding a way to market thru private sellers on eBay. In recent years (founded in 2015) we've had biddr.com appearing to complete with sixbid.com, and the interesting trend of last couple of years where every man, dog and child has started a biddr-based auction house - it almost seems to be replacing eBay as an outlet for semi-professional individual sellers.

So, any attempt to measure sales trends would have to keep up with all these changes!

[robinjojo]

Yes, very interesting charts.  However, these numbers apply only for coins appearing at auction, so if one were to somehow factor in coins sold at the retail dealer level they of course would be higher.

Getting to the point of this thread, what is the future for ancient numismatics, I think that would be dictated on: 1) the supply of coins entering the market primarily through hoards and individual finds; 2) the types of coins entering the market; 3) the world economic and geopolitical situation and ; 4) the number of new collectors entering the ancient coins arena.  Now, being a forgetful old foggie I might have missed a factor or two, but I think those are the main ones.

As a general observation I have noticed a significant influx of coins that were considered to be in the past quite rare, such as the Tigranes II tetradrachms that now seem to be coming out the woodwork.  Also, I have the impression that as conflict increases in parts of the world, or persists, it seems that lots of coins are entering through back channels, something that I am sure has existed almost since the dawn of collecting ancient coins, and other types as well.  Lots of pharaonic have been coming out of Syria and other places in the Middle East for the past few years, which in turn seems to have increased collector interest in these coins.  This might be just my impression, but there is definitely an ebb and flow in the supply of these and other coins.      

Edited December 16, 2023 by robinjojo

[Rand]

This plot is not about classical ancient coins but is more accurate - I collected records of these coins for many years, including eBay, online shops, and printed catalogues. 

There will be missed coins from older catalogues, as I need to find many. For museum records, the date is when the coin was first published when the acquisition date is unavailable. I am sure there are more coins in museum collections as some relevant museums did not reply to my requests to provide information or refused it (I will not name them). I multiplied the number of new coins from 2021-2023 by 3.3 to get a decade estimate.

I do not attempt the price analysis, as sale values are missing for many older coins. Also, from the 56 coins I know to be in private hands, I own 17, so despite my best intentions, I could have influenced the prices (I no longer focus on these coins).

Edited December 16, 2023 by Rand

[Rand]

An example of a coin plotted above

[kirispupis]

My suspicion is that there are many types that have been perceived to increase in quantity but in reality have not. When a researcher wrote that there were "only 8 known examples", it was extremely difficult for him/her to know exactly how many there were. They could peruse known museum collections and those well-known private collections who worked with them, but that was a poor estimate.

Back then, though there were auctions, the majority of coins changed hands through private sales and coin stores. Therefore, a great many coins changed hands without anyone else knowing.

Today, the majority of coins are sold online. Those sold at auctions are easily tracked. It therefore may appear that issues of certain coins are increasing, but that's only because coins previously unknown are slowly hitting the market. Online auctions have only really been tracked for the last twenty years. Imagine a coin purchased by someone 30 years old in 1990. That person is now 60, and so (assuming he likes the coin) it will likely be another 30 years before it hits the market again.

I also believe that more people are trying to make a profit in buying/selling ancient coins in this digital age. In the past, your average coin would have spent many years in a private collection, but I'm sure the average these days is much less. That will obviously skew the number sold of a given type higher.

Finally, there obviously are coins that are truly hitting the market for the first time. The Baktrian coinage is the obvious example, but there are more. I highly doubt all these Tigranes II tets have been sitting in private collections all these years.

However, I do believe the majority of Roman and Greek coins that appear new to the market are just ones that have been sitting in private collections.

[velarfricative]

6 hours ago, Cordoba said:

More recently, a hoard of baktrians popped up around 2019. plato tetradrachms, while still very rare, have came to auction much more often than it did before 2019. 

The "EXTREMELY RARE AND IMPOSSIBLE TO FIND" descriptor that every auction house adds to Plato tetradrachms gets less true by the year. It seems to me that the consignor has been smart, and is sending them one at a time to many different auction houses.

[DonnaML]

Didn't or doesn't the Coryssa database (I believe created by Rasiel Suarez) cover ebay and/or other retail sales? I never took the time to figure out how to use it; it seemed way too complicated for my primitive research skills!

[Rand]

I did check the Coryssa database before and found a few records from eBay and other sources not known to me, but it only includes some eBay coin sales. I did not check it during the last two years or so, though.

[Sulla80]

The one thing I think we can probably predict is that there will continue to be two markets:

- investor coin market

- lower grade coins

with the highest grade coins continuing to go the path of modern coins where use of grading services is more common and grade perfection is rewarded with higher and higher prices.

I wrote up some notes on pricing a few years ago that can be found here: https://www.sullacoins.com/post/calculating-the-price

This graph updated recently:

Not as simple as it looks: there are likely other factors

    Vendors joining internet venues & ACSearch

    Lower quality coins coming to auction

    Same coins reselling more frequently

Edited December 17, 2023 by Sulla80

[DLTcoins]

8 hours ago, Cordoba said:

similar thing happened with baktrians. This is a chart from Glenn's Money and Power in Hellenistic Baktria, showing how many of a certain type of Antimachos tets pop up each year. before the 1990's it was pretty rare, but now a relatively common type. 

More recently, a hoard of baktrians popped up around 2019. plato tetradrachms, while still very rare, have came to auction much more often than it did before 2019. 

The primary factor with Bactrian coins is the 1992 Mir Zakah hoard of some 550,000 coins found in a well in Afghanistan. The coins in the hoard dated from the late 5th century BC to the 1st century AD: early Indian bent-bar and punch-marked coins, Greek, Graeco-Bactrian, Indo-Greek, Indo-Scythian, Indo-Parthian, and Kushan. Compare dates in the following account with the chart above:

"As luck would have it, in 1994, [Dr. Edmund] Bopearachchi got the opportunity to examine coins from the second Mir Zakah deposit. He was in Peshawar, and in the Shinwari Bazaar, he found coins with the same patina that he had seen in the coins in France. But nothing prepared him for the cornucopia of coins that he was to see. Sacks full, each containing 50 kilograms, were emptied in heaps before him, and after some time he had to tell the coin sellers to stop. He calls the experience a joy and a curse - a joy, because no numismatist could have seen such a deluge of coins; a curse because he knew that many of them would disappear into private collections, to which no one would have access. And as feared, in 1995, three tonnes of coins from the second Mir Zakah deposit were smuggled by private aircraft to London, and then taken to Boulogne and on to Basel, in Switzerland."

http://www.worldofcoins.eu/forum/index.php?topic=33069.0

The Mir Zakah coins are still being parcelled out, both individually and in large wholesale lots. 

 

Edited December 17, 2023 by DLTcoins

[KenDorney]

On 12/16/2023 at 9:32 AM, Rand said:

Can the numismatic market become overwhelmed with supply and follow the stamp market decline in the lower-end segment?

Antiques ownership's political and legal pressure might also influence the market unpredictably. What do you think about the future of numismatics?

Yes, it is possible.  But currently the trend is that there are plenty of new collectors, speculators, investors, etc. entering the market.  In my 35+ years as a dealer I have always been amazed to see hoards of coins be absorbed by the market.  We often think its not possible, there are too many coins for the market to bear and support.  But, on average, prices still seem to steadily climb.  It is entirely possible that sometime in the future these small disks of metal lose popularity and prices collapse.  That can happen in any industry.  I dont see it happening in my lifetime, but I have seem massive declines elsewhere.  Antiquities used to be very popular and prices were strong.  They are now not very popular and prices are continually dropping.  I am glad I sold my collection a couple years ago.  The auction house I used said they would not actively persue consignments of them any longer.

 

[Salomons Cat]

Well, how shall I say it... I'll do it with a picture. (source: wikipedia)

The internet is always growing 😄 

Another graph (source: webretailer.com, based on Statista)

The results on acsearch show how many coins found their way to their database in a given year. But this doesn't measure how many coins exist in total, how @Rand has already mentioned. I'm actually surprised that the curves that @Rand generated are not steeper. That's why I believe that they clearly support the hypothesis that there is only a limited supply of ancient coins.

Also - right now, the community of ancient coin collectors is incredibly small. Most of us have experienced that a few times. How often does it happen that you bid in an auction and then you figure out that the other bidder was a colleague from this forum here? I think that this has happened to most of us.
The market is somehow very strong although the community is so small. I don't want to know what happens when a few philatelists figure out that ancient coins are more interesting than stamps 😶

Edited December 19, 2023 by Salomons Cat
By the way - uncompressed, the size of wikipedia text is measured in TB and not in GB. For those who wondered :)

[Rand]

My view is that ancient coins have a big growth potential, and the market is extremely unlikely to collapse. Over the last decades, the sales values have been modest, but this may change.

• Findings from metal detecting are likely to level or reduce. The physics of metal detecting remains essentially the same; how much it can be improved is unclear.
• In absolute numbers, many ancient coin types are scarce at a global scale. Whether 1,000 or 10,000 aurei are sold each, this is a small number.
• More material may benefit the market as it generates more interest from bigger players, advertising, market creation, etc.
• Unlike some other collectables, ancient numismatics benefits from the attractive link to earlier history, from which we do not have that many records.
• Coins are portable and durable - a collector can use their wine fridge for their wine rather than stamps.
• Significant proportions of the material may be removed from the market by being deposited in museum collections by wealthy collectors.
• Supply of new finds to the market may be restricted by legislation.

The above is likely more relevant to the mid-upper segment.

[Valentinian]

On 12/19/2023 at 12:47 PM, KenDorney said:

It is entirely possible that sometime in the future these small disks of metal lose popularity and prices collapse.  That can happen in any industry.  I don't see it happening in my lifetime, but I have seem massive declines elsewhere.  Antiquities used to be very popular and prices were strong.  They are now not very popular and prices are continually dropping.  I am glad I sold my collection a couple years ago.  The auction house I used said they would not actively pursue consignments of them any longer.

The dailybee.com has an article on 25 types of collectibles that were once more valuable than they are now:

https://www.dailybee.com/en/worth-valuable-now-theyre?ly

I'd like to think that ancient-coin collecting has staying-power, unlike some of those categories which were obvious fads. But some other categories, like fine silver dining ware, which can be enjoyed and appreciated on a daily basis, are nevertheless much less popular than years ago. Our kids might accept our silverware as an inheritance, but they don't really want it. And, it would probably sell for only about melt value.

Consider books. If you want information about ancient-coins, are you going to seek and buy the right book, or search the web for free?  Some things go down in value. I think the expensive-watch industry is hanging on only by sophisticated advertising campaigns. Diamond prices are going down. Try to resell a diamond and see what you can get for it. But, owning a nice diamond can yield pleasure for years. Does its value have to go up to make you happy to own something? 

Our hobby pays dividends continuously as we appreciate what we have and we enjoy the learning that coins inspire. All the market forces discussed above may result in changes in the market. Any direction is good for me. If prices go down, I can buy coins for less. If prices go up, my collection becomes more valuable. I don't worry about the market. I, personally, love the hobby and enjoy it every day.