Help! Ancient coin or modern fake?

[HipShot Photography]

While I don't own the coin shown below, I recently photographed it as part of a larger collection of about 30 ancient coins. Among them was one I previously identified as a fake—not something I was actively seeking, but rather a discovery stumbled upon while researching the coin, with some help from one of Wayne Sayles' books. Fast forward a few weeks, and when I shared the image below on social media—another coin from the same lot— someone on Instagram pointed out that it appeared to be cast rather than struck, as expected, and expressed concern that I might have spent a lot on it. As I mentioned, I don't own it, but this skepticism led me to wonder: could this coin also be a counterfeit? Another reason for my interest, though hardly conclusive, is the colouring of this coin looks strikingly similar to the confirmed fake. Since then, I've tried to gather information about it, but with little success. Does anyone have any thoughts or comments they would care to share? What would you tell the owner of the coin? 

[robinjojo]

That coin is certainly crude in terms of die work.  There's also odd flatness in the middle of Alexander III's portrait.  

There are also pits that could be due to corrosion or breaks in silver plating revealing a copper core (fourrée?).  

I don't think this is a cast coin and it appears to be a drachm.  Weight information would confirm that guess.

I'd be the first to admit a general lack of knowledge when it comes to the vast coinage of Alexander III, so perhaps others can make a better assessment of this coin.

I found a similar coin, with a monogram under the chair online for comparison.  Kolophon mint.

 https://www.vcoins.com/en/stores/aeternitas_numismatics/2/product/alexander_iii_the_great_ar_drachma_efef_kolophon_mint_hercules__zeus/2012219/Default.aspx

Edited October 22, 2024 by robinjojo

[Kaleun96]

Looks fine to me too. Very much a typical drachm from the Kolophon mint of this period, the die wear is also common to see on these drachms. The exact type is Price 1827, you can find more examples at that link.

I wouldn't have any concerns about it. Chances are the comment calling it fake was from someone who isn't very experienced with ancient coins, who knows why they make these comments with such conviction but it's common to see on reddit as well.

[ambr0zie]

Disclaimer - I am not an expert in detecting forgeries. 

1. This coin looks OK for me too. 

2. The coloring at the edge can occur after artifcial toning (intentional or not)

3. On facebook groups (and not only) there is a large number of experts with only 1 area of expertise - the Fake Experts. 
They are very busy and they only have time for a 1 word comment "Fake". Without any explanations. 
There is a small minority in Fake Experts Society, they have more time in their hands so they afford spending 15 seconds more in comments like "Fake - cast" "Fake - soft letters" as these are the only things they know, no matter the coin in question. 

I would ignore these experts and only consider opinions from experienced collectors, and of course, if you find identical coins in the fake database. 

[HipShot Photography]

2 hours ago, Kaleun96 said:

Chances are the comment calling it fake was from someone who isn't very experienced with ancient coins, who knows why they make these comments with such conviction but it's common to see on reddit as well.

Thanks for your comments. In their defence, the person who commented acknowledged they were not an expert and suggested that while something looked fishy to them, I should check it out with an expert. Having already found one fake in the batch, I took his advice. 

[HipShot Photography]

3 hours ago, Kaleun96 said:

The exact type is Price 1827, you can find more examples at that link.

Thanks for the link, but it appears to need fixing. I'm getting a page error. Regardless, I looked it up directly, and it is an excellent match. Thank you. 

[Kaleun96]

1 hour ago, HipShot Photography said:

Thanks for the link, but it appears to need fixing. I'm getting a page error. Regardless, I looked it up directly, and it is an excellent match. Thank you. 

Ah yeah the ANS hosted websites like PELLA, OCRE, RRO, etc have been having some issues the past couple of days. The sites are working for me at the moment but they seem to drop offline every now and then or take ages to load properly.

[JAZ Numismatics]

The coin looks perfectly legit to me, but in the future, you should always include the weight and diameter in questions of authenticity. Also, the toning is not unusual. Older paper coin envelopes used to contain a slight amount of sulphur in their composition, which reacted with silver coins to produce rainbow toning. Whether you like it or not is a matter of personal taste.

[HipShot Photography]

4 hours ago, JAZ Numismatics said:

in the future, you should always include the weight and diameter in questions of authenticity.

Thanks for your assessment. I agree that I need the additional information, but as I don't own the coin and shot it weeks ago, I don't have that information available. All of these questions came up after the fact. 

[HipShot Photography]

6 hours ago, JAZ Numismatics said:

Older paper coin envelopes used to contain a slight amount of sulphur in their composition, which reacted with silver coins to produce rainbow toning. Whether you like it or not is a matter of personal taste.

I like the colours of this coin, but what initially caused me concern was how similar it was to other coins in the lot, particularly a known fake.  

Going left to right, the first two images below are from a confirmed counterfeit. The following two are the coins I posted. All of the coins, including the other five shown here,  are the same colour. As several people here have pointed out, this may not be a problem, but it seemed odd. 

 

[JAZ Numismatics]

I was fooled by one of those Mesembrian diobols myself, some years back - they're deceptively good forgeries. You are right to be suspicious of the rest of the coins of course. It's possible that they were all kept in the same old envelopes and developed similar toning. I don't see anything about the toning that looks sketchy. But one fake poisons the pot, as they say. I would be reluctant to buy any of the coins without a return policy, so I could properly vet them.

[Deinomenid]

With the caveat I too am inexpert on these, one of the reasons for my lack of expertise here is several of the  types you show are notorious for fakery, so I steer clear, other than to amuse myself with records of the collections of the vast numbers of fake dies. Re the  initial coin, the specific type does feature on the main fake sites so should be checked against those, and  -just in case you don't know - given the truly vast numbers of Chersonesus lion fakes even NGC now refuses to certify them. If  Barry Murphy  can't tell, then I certainly can't. About the only thing in its favour to me is it is offcentre, not typically a feature of the endless fakes.

This is very minor but if you compare the trident dots with those in  Price 1827, they are noticeably different, in that none of the Pella examples look quite so consistently careless, though this is very partial observation and  one  I nearly did not  make-

   vs        

That  there are flagged fake types of these, and that they all look the same is sufficiently alarming to make me not buy the set were it offered, even at a very low  price. That is different from proof of falsehood. On your question though, would  I tell the  owner? Yes.

 

And  just for  fun, here are some of the relevant fake dies. There are many more.

 

 

[Kaleun96]

Just had a quick look on acsearch using the image search feature and found a dozen obverse die matches, including one NGC-slabbed example. Neither the obverse die or reverse die match the example I found on forvm (there's liklely more but given searching "drachm" matches "tetradrachm" as well, I didn't bother looking harder).

The image search didn't bring up any reverse die matches but I wouldn't be surprised if there are some anyway. You can find examples with more wobbly dots on Zeus' staff/sceptre but they're not too common it seems, though I don't think this is a sign characteristic of the fakes and we wouldn't necessarily expect it to be (versus, say, issues with style) so it wouldn't concern me too much.

A slabbed NGC example on the left, the coin of this thread on the right:

I'm quite cautious about Alexander drachms for the reason @Deinomenid mentions so I would rarely look to buy them from a non-top tier auction house but in this case I think this one is likely good. If it's a fake, we're definitely in trouble as collectors 😅

[Nemo]

"I like the colours of this coin, but what initially caused me concern was how similar it was to other coins in the lot, particularly a known fake."

I do not see any fake and as far as I can tell non of these is published anywhere in any reliable source like literature about fakes, literature about this coinage etc.

The Mesembria Diobol is fine, different dies, style and metal than the ones published in BOC and different dies than the other fakes of this emission I know.

Pictures of the fakes in BOC.

 

 

 

[Nemo]

Interestingly  these fakes from BOC are listed in the main book about the coinage of Mesambria as authentic!

Karajotov, I. The Coinage of Mesambria Vol I: Silver and Gold coins of Mesambria. (Sozopol, Bulgaria, 1994)

here are the important pages 27+28 and plate III N. 105-107 and plate IV 108-110

They were publihsed 1989 as fakes so it is not understandable that they were listed 1994 in the book as authentic knowning about the condemning problems of these coin.

[HipShot Photography]

This is the article I saw about the coin that was confirmed as a counterfeit.  From this one, I started looking at the others, eventually posting the images here.

It is from Wayne Sayles book, below.

Edited October 24, 2024 by HipShot Photography

[Deinomenid]

Yes, the BOC selection shown above is very far from the full extent of the number of fakes.

There are so many more!

As that fake die photo I posted tried to show. 

[Nemo]

I do not understand, in Sayles book is on top a Genuine one shown for comparison which has similar eyes than the one here wrongly accused to be Fake!

Than we have below in the book of Sayles the BOC Fakes I posted already with different EYES!

And very problematic on bottom right an authentic one wrongly condemned, because he wrongly and stupidly  assumed that all with "strange" eyes would be Fake not considering that there are authentic coins too with auch eyes!

There are No new Fakes in Sayles book, a Genuine one one top, the already from me posted BOC Fakes and a wrongly condemned one.

I collect These and I have several authentic ones and Fake one (knnowingly bought for comparison) and of course I did Research Literature about them (about Fakes and coins of this Emission) looking which dies are fine because known before the Fakes appearppeared  (Museum collections, old catalogues, or from legal excavations ).

Edited October 25, 2024 by Nemo

[Nemo]

Here is the pages of IBSCC Bulletin on Counterfeits BOCS Vol 15 No.1 1990 about them and Classical Deception Counterfeits, Forgeries and Reproductions of Ancient Coins by  Wayne G. Sayles, 2001

and my fakes, the right one and the two left ones are more recent fakes and the other 4  are "black sea hoard" fakes.

And links to most important Celator articles

Vol 06 No. 09 September 1992

https://social.vcoins.com/files/file/64-vol-06-no-09-september-1992/

To summarize, no proven authentic ones form these dies known, all are from 8 obverse dies and 9 reverse die (die ratio is not plausible) and all are die linked with each other resulting in the case that the oberse dies are linked with too many reverse dies.

"The analysis of these photographs is
very revealing. Among the 48 examples
are eight obverse die types and nine
reverse die types (Fig. I). This is con-
siste nt with theCNG group of 300 coins
which had been divided into seven ob-
verse die types. While the obverse to
reverse die ratio is unusual, the die com-
binations are even more peculiar.
Obverse die "A", for example, is
matched with eight of the nine reverse
dies. Fourofthe revers dies are matched
with at least five different obverse dies
each; and every one of the reverse dies
is matched to at least three different
obverse dies. This, of course, does not
prove anything, but it is certainly not the
norm for mint production, nor is it typi-
cal of the distributions found in Greek
co in hoards of the fourth century B.C.
The most remarkable die matches in-
volved ten coins from the museum at
Nesebur in Bulgaria. ...it is
remarkable that everyone of the Nesebur
museum coins photographed by Dr.
Flegler linked with either an obverse or
reverse die in the Heritage sample group!
Dr. Fleg ler informed us that the coins in
question were acquired by the museum
in 1986 from a "supervised" excava-
lion."

 

 

Vol 07 No. 08 August 1993

https://social.vcoins.com/files/file/75-vol-07-no-08-august-1993/

"Here is what I found out on a recent
trip to Bulgaria. These same diobols of
Mesembria and Apollonia, from the
same dies as th ose in the "hoard", are
currently onsale in Sofia in the National
Historical Mu se um' s gift shop for the
equivalent of $3.00 each as copies-not
as ancient coins, not as ancient forger-
i es-but as modem co pies. "