I've made a visual guide of different grades of Ancient Coins :)

[AncientCoinnoisseur]

Happy Holidays! 🎄 Another day, another infographic 🙂

So, I cannot take the merit for the descriptions of the different grades, I have used the beautiful guide of Forvm Ancient Coins:

https://www.forumancientcoins.com/numiswiki/view.asp?key=grading guidelines for ancient coins

What I did do was to look for pictures of said grades on acsearch, with a few tweaks, and in order to make the visual comparison more immediate, I have tried to use the same coin in various states of preservation. In order to do so, I have chosen something both relatively rare and desirable, so that even coins in 'fair' state would be sold at auction, but not so rare that only coins in decent condition are around (i.e. some drachms from Alexandria). I went for a Julius Caesar portrait denarius, which covers basically the whole spectrum from Poor to aFDC. 

Please note that Ancient Coin Grading is not an exact science, and as you can see from the box on the left, it has its fair share of bias and personal preference. Some dealers are more conservative with grades, others less so, but I have tried my best to give you a rough idea. 

I hope you enjoy it! 🙂 

[idesofmarch01]

This is an excellent chart and using one type of ancient coin to illustrate the various grades is very illustrative.  There is, however, one coin in the chart that I believe has been tooled (despite the fact that denarii rarely are) and I would suggest substituting a different coin.

Specifically, look at the two areas circled in yellow in the picture below:

In the aFDC coin, the hairlines appear to have been engraved into a smoothly worn area, while in the gEF coin they appear to be untouched and originally struck.  Also, there appears to be some re-engraving on the reverse as well, in the area where the arm holds the staff.

Plus, at least in my opinion, the gEF coin is far superior to the aFDC coin based on the included pictures.

Possibly the aFDC coin looks better in hand, though, so a more thorough inspection would be warranted if a collector were interested in acquiring this coin.  So feel free to disregard this analysis if it's based on insufficient evidence!

[AncientCoinnoisseur]

@idesofmarch01 Thanks, I didn’t like this aFDC too much, but I could only find two coins of Caesar pf this type in aFDC condition, the other being this one:

(https://www.acsearch.info/search.html?id=5419119), but Bertolami has a history of weird stuff going on sometimes, so I (wrongly I guess) went with the NAC one. 

Maybe the video is more convincing:

There were other coins that could demonstrate the aFDC state better, usually gold coins, like this one for example:

but I should have used different coins for the various grades and comparisons could have been a bit harder. I guess I should have trusted Bertolami this time 🙂

[idesofmarch01]

I very much agree that the video of the coin looks much more convincing as an aFDC coin -- so much so that I would reconsider my judgment based on that video alone.  The coin doesn't look tooled when you can see the details from various angles and see the depth of the strike, which now looks like an original strike rather than a re-engraving

Thanks for posting this.

 

[panzerman]

Excellent thread!

 

John

[AncientCoinnoisseur]

@idesofmarch01 no worries, I didn’t like the picture either, but the video convinced me 🙂  

@panzerman Thanks!