Errol Morris on art forger Han van Meegeren

I recently stumbled across Error Morris' seven-part essay on the artist and forger Han van Meegeren. He forged Vermeers in Nazi-occupied Netherlands.

Morris believes the false Vermeers were accepted not because of their resemblance to real Vermeers, but because they looked like a cross between Vermeers and the Nazi art of the day. Nothing about coins, but a bizarre story about how connoisseurs fool themselves.

...
The Uncanny Valley is a concept developed by the Japanese robot scientist Masahiro Mori. It concerns the design of humanoid robots. Mori’s theory is relatively simple. We tend to reject robots that look too much like people. Slight discrepancies and incongruities between what we look like and what they look like disturb us. The closer a robot resembles a human, the more critical we become, the more sensitive to slight discrepancies, variations, imperfections. ... You would think a close copy would be the goal of a forger, but it might not be a smart way to go. If you were a brilliant technician it might be an acceptable strategy, but my forger, Van Meegeren, is not as good as that. So if he’s going to try to pass himself off as Vermeer, he isn’t going to do it by painting “The Girl With Two Pearl Earrings.”

... nobody ever did any scientific test on Van Meegeren, even the stuff that was available in his day, until after he confessed. And to this day, people hardly ever test pictures, even multi-million dollar ones. And I was so surprised by that that I kept asking, over and over again: why? Why would that be? Before you buy a house, you have someone go through it for termites and the rest. How could it be that when you’re going to lay out $10 million for a painting, you don’t test it beforehand? And the answer is that you don’t test it because, at the point of being about to buy it, you’re in love!

(via Cheap Talk)

Looking for treasure

No coins, but the largest hoard of Anglo-Saxon gold was recently found in England. [New York Times]. NPR [audio + transcript].

... the discovery was not the outcome of a carefully planned archaeological enterprise, but the product of a lone amateur stumbling about with a metal detector.

Here in the US there aren't any Roman treasures to find with metal detectors. Or are there? In 1924 Charles Manier found two gigantic lead crosses with Roman-Jewish inscriptions outside Tucson Arizona. The crosses, swords, and other “Roman” relics were supposedly exhibited in Tucson in 2003 according to Western & Eastern Treasures magazine's copy of a story from the Tucson Citizen. However, the story doesn't show up in 2009 search of the Tucson paper's archives nor does it show up in current or archive.org searches of the Arizona State Museum's web site.

New York judge sinks Google reprint settlement

Bobbie Johnson reports in today's Guardian, “Google Books deal postponed after avalanche of criticism”.

The judge overseeing Google's controversial agreement with American publishers to digitise millions of books has delayed a hearing into the $125m deal - effectively shutting down the settlement and sending it back to the drawing board.

The deal, if and when it happens, will allow Google to sell out-of-print in-copyright books that it doesn't have the rights to. The money would go into a lockbox that the copyright holders could get when they realize they own money-making orphan books.

The good news is that Google and On Demand Books have a partnership to print public domain titles in bookstores using the Espresso Book Machine. You'll be able to walk into bookstores (currently in San Francisco; New Orleans; Ann Arbor; Manchester Center, Vermont; and Provo, Utah) and for $8 walk out with a paperback book such as Catalog of the Greek coins of Phyrgia.

And look at that cover! I feel certain it was auto-generated. I may be the first human to have ever seen the cover of this numismatic book, when I opened the web site this morning. If the Espresso Book Machine ever makes it to New York I will be ready with many titles I'm willing to pay $8 for. If the Google deal had gone through many titles from the 20th century could have been available for just a little more.

Charles Davis mail bid sale October 17, 2009

Charles Davis is holding a mail bid sale [PDF] October 17th. 691 lots. Many titles on British tokens. Lots 491-578 are titles on ancients and many of the ancients titles are useful catalogs: SNG volumes, Crawford on Roman Republican, RIC volumes etc.

The catalog gives the URL of Davis' (new?) site, http://​www.​charlesdavisnumismatics.​com/ which, at the time of this writing, is merely a gallery of photographs of numismatic books and bindings.

I received a copy in the mail today.

Creepy talking Rhodes tetradrachm

A creepy talking Rhodes tetradrachm urges you to shop for reproduction coin necklaces created by Boxing Pandora.

Another video of coin striking

William Bjornson, Arion the Wanderer, and Ian Cnulle of the An Tir Moneyers Guild demonstrate striking a coin in the ancient Greek style and the 2009 ANA Money Show.

There is a Yahoo group for folks who re-enact ancient methods of coining.

Gregory Zorzos goes commercial

Gregory Zorzos, whose strange ancient coin YouTube videos have been discussed before has gone commercial.

His videos Ancient coins from Bactriane and PICTURES OF BYZANTINE COINS
are available from Amazon.com as video on demand.

The price is $25 for a digital download that can be played on two computers. The Baktrian video can also be rented for seven days for $2. The first two minutes of the videos can be seen for free by following the links above.

Ancient Coin Auction Catalogues 1880-1980

Charles Davis is offering a new book by John Spring, Ancient Coin Auction Catalogues 1880-1980. It's described as 374 pages, size A4 (roughly equivelent to 8.5x11).

If any readers have seen it please leave a comment letting us know what you think.

Wikipedia on fourrées

Wikipedia's article on fourrées includes a section on modern fourrées which surprised me

The 1982 and later US one cent piece (Lincoln penny) is an example of a fourrée since it is zinc which has been plated with copper in a manner to deceive.

Nice! I hadn't thought about it that way before.

The image on this post is not from Wikipedia, but from my own collection of fourrées depicting Medusa. I bought this in 2003 and finally got around to scanning it. This one is from Rome, about 74 BC, with the name of the moneyer L. Cossutius C.f. Sabula. The numeral on the back, XXII I think for mine, is for the die; Michael Crawford says “The control-marks are the numerals from I to XXXXII; no control-numeral has more than one die.” I would be interested to see other XXII issues to see if they are in similar style to this fourrée.

Ancient silver coins in Uttar Pradesh

Thaindian News reports (no byline)

Lucknow, Aug 20 (IANS) Nearly 68 kg of ancient silver coins dating back to 1861 and 1892 were recovered from three men who were arrested in Uttar Pradesh’s Varanasi district, police said Thursday.
Rajesh Singh, Aditya Sharan and Mukesh Mishra were nabbed Wednesday night from Chetganj locality of Varanasi, about 250 km from here.

...

According to police, the coins carry symbols of Queen Victoria and King George V of Britain.

“We will hand over the coins to the archaeological department for evaluation,” said Rai.

How can this hoard date back to 1861 and 1892? Shouldn't it be one or the other?

Ukrainian detained for attempting to smuggle ancient coin into Ukraine

“Ukrainian detained for attempting to smuggle ancient coin into Ukraine” reports the Kyiv Post (no byline).

The press service of the Crimean customs service reported on Wednesday that a copper coin had been found in his wallet at the Kerch customs post.

According to preliminary reports, this is a coin from Panticapaeum dates (sic) to around 314-310 BC.

The illustration depicts not an ancient coin, but twelve old coins, mostly British pence with the reverse used in the 19th and 20th centuries.

Art Pantine repatination kits

A reader alerted me to the Art Patine web site, YouTube videos, and items of eBay seller la_vitrine_du_prospecteur. [A Google translation of the French site is available.]

Art Patine is selling a patination product for coins and antiquities, replica Roman coins (plus toy metal detector), and antiquities like this triple phallus.

As far as I know this is the first repatination product marketed directly to coin cleaners and replica merchants. The art of patinating isn't new, bronze artists have been doing it for centuries and there are even books such as Richard Hughes and Michael Rowe's The Colouring, Bronzing and Patination of Metals (1991) (I haven't read this.). I asked some zappers a few years ago about patination and they all insisted they don't do anything beyond reverse electrolysis.


If anyone is using this product I'd be interested in a review. I would also be interested in hearing from any bronze artists who patinate and want to guest-blog about it here.

I don't know much about detecting artificial patinas. Supposedly a real patina is thicker and often changes color or consistency with depth. Authentication seems to require destructively slicing into coins; I haven't been able to bring myself to do that. (It's also illegal damage antiquities in some countries). Does anyone out there have much experience with spotting artificial patinas?

Art Pantine also sells a product for silver plating coins (video here).

Andrew McCabe visits a bookbinder

Andrew McCabe describes his visit to a bookbinder on Moneta-L.

...

The real toughies were Martini, Haeberlin and Goodman. Martini was a special case, a softback with superb but loose plates that I needed to get bound into a recovered hardback. After a debate during which the bookbinder asked me "is this a valuable book" (it is, very.) he decided rather than stitching into the existing paper of the plates, to make a separate attachement to each plate which will then get stitched in.

...

Israel to require collectors to register?

Cultural Property Observer comments on a Jerusalem Post story by Jonah Newman on new enforcement of a 2002 law jailing unregistered collectors for up to six months. Under Israeli law, a collector is anyone with 15 or more artifacts.

This seems like a huge pain for the Israeli government, especially if, as Newman reports, 100,000 citizens have 15+ artifacts and collectors can choose to receive an appraisal of the historical significance of their artifacts. Who writes appraisals of 1,500,000+ artifacts?

Cultural Property Observer hints that the mandatory registration in Greece has devolved into a system where only wealthy, “connected,” people become “registered collectors.”.

I don't know much about the Greek registration system. It's described here. Apparently, under Greek law, the collector is required to give the government photographs of every object and facilitate visits. The collector “shall be responsible for the unity of a collection. The collection may be dispersed upon permit granted by the Minister of Culture following an opinion of the Central Archaeological Council.” What does that mean? If a Greek collector decides to trade a coin with another registered collector do both need permission from the Central Archaeological Council? How often does it meet?

Greek collectors have some rights, for example they are entitled to “reproduce and dispose of photographs or other representations of their monuments.” Does this mean non-collectors cannot dispose of photographs? How do do non-collectors dispose of photographs they don't want anymore?

Medals of Dishonor

I am not in London and unable to see Medals of Dishonor at the British Museum.

It's an exhibit of satirical and political medals from the 16th to the 20th centuries, including medals recently commissioned. The web site includes a gallery of 18 medals. TimeOut: London has a review.

OxbowBooks has the catalog for $30 and Amazon has it available for preorder.

Numismatists needed (for pay!)

The editors of Business Standard report “Jobs aplenty in archaeology dept, but no takers”.

There are many a job opening, with posts falling vacant regularly, but there are no candidates to fill them up. This is the plight of the Archaeological Survey of India ...

...

“The situation is still deplorable in this area. Across the country, there are hardly 3-4 numismatists left to study old and ancient coins,” he said.

Underling the urgent need to create a cadre of epigraphists and numismatists, Rao said the Vivekananda Institute of Indian Studies (VIIS) of which he is the director would start shortly programmes in Indian studies including epigraphy and numismatics in co-operation with the ASI and the directorate.

...

Ancient 'love tokens'

In the 19th century coins were often used for engraving. They are called 'Love tokens' by collectors and there is even an eBay category for collectors of such items.

Ancient coins were sometimes modified in similar ways. They seem to be very rare, I've only found a few references to them. In the academic literature I found a short piece from Schweizer Muenzblatter vol 19 1969 p. 14, “Amulettarige Uberarbeitung eines spatromischen Follis” and a three page article in English by Brooks Emmons Levy, “Another Converted Roman Coin?” (Schweizer Munzblatter vol. 32 (1982), p. 40.

The first article features a Roman follis, the second a 30mm provincial from Antioch featuring Mên.

Ken Steiglitz illustrates a Ptolemaic coin with similar modifications on his web site. I also found a Bosporan coin with similar mutilation in an old CNG catalog. The coin pictured above comes from FORVM.

I would be interested in seeing pictures of similar coins, or speculation on the why this was done. It strikes me that the few examples I've found come from very different times and places, but have similar grooves. This could be because grooves are the easiest thing to cut, so everyone who mutilates a coin naturally does grooves.

FORVM attributed my coin as being from the Amphipolis mint. I don't know much about Alexander bronzes, does anyone know if this is correct? What is the diagnostic?

Peter Rosa on YouTube

Someone has made an animated slide show of Greek Coin replica dies made by Peter Rosa. The video is set to some classical music that I don't recognize.



There is also a Part 2.

bkrpr.org

The Book Ripper Project, bkrpr.org, has plans and software for a book scanner that costs $250 to build. With a human turning the pages it can scan 600 pages an hour.



The $250 cost is mostly two digital cameras, which you can also use for anything else you want.

(via TeleRead)

Paul-Francis Jacquier catalog 36 up

Paul-Francis Jacquier's catalog 36 (Summer 2009) is up. The sale features 775 (+79) lots of ancient coins and 380 lots of numismatic literature.

Looks like some good stuff. Lot 1043 is Price's The Coinage in the Name of Alexander the Great and Philip Arrhidaeus estimated at 225 euros.

I haven't bought coins from Mr. Jacquier but I have bought numismatic books and had no problems.

Network of scientific numismatic libraries to form

Founding Meeting in Glasgow
A new international network of scientific numismatic libraries is about to be establishing the International Numismatic Libraries Network (INLN). Its aims will be to coordinate common efforts (for ex. in developing cataloguing standards) and quite generally to distribute and to exchange informations.

The INLN includes already 25 numismatic libraries world-wide and will be founded formally at the International Numismatic Congress in Glasgow (2nd and 3rd September 2009).

For more informations, please contact Ans ter Woerds (Geldmuseum, Utrecht) or Elizabeth Hahn (American Numismatic Society, New York).

(via International Numismatic e-News (July 2009) [PDF] via the ANS Twitter feed)

I wasn't aware of International Numismatic e-News. It seems to be monthly and in English and German. The current issue (link above) previews the XIVth International Numismatic Congress in Glasgow and lists newly published numismatic books. The main web site, muenzgeschichte.ch, seems to be German-only and I couldn't figure out if other issues of International Numismatic e-News are available. I did find an interesting German numismatic blog, http://numismatica.twoday.net/. Read it in English using Google's translator.

Cory Doctorow essay on public organizations shaking down the public for access to their own collection

Cory Doctorow's essay, “UK National Portrait Gallery threatens Wikipedia over scans of its public domain art” is featured on bOING bOING today.

... If you take public money to buy art, you should make that art available to the public using the best, most efficient means possible. If you believe the public wants to subsidize the creation of commercial art-books, then get out of the art-gallery business, start a publisher and hit the government up for some free tax-money.

acsearch.info

Simon Wieland, Lars Rutten and Markus Beyeler launched acsearch.info today. It includes 300,000 ancient coin auction and sale records with photos.

The announcement says that the site had planned to launch later in the year, but “hurried a bit” to launch this week.

I wish them the best of luck! The site is visually pleasing. Unlike CoinArchives, if there are more than 1000 results it is possible to view them all. Unfortunately, acsearch.info only shows 20 coins per pages meaning a lot of clicking and scrolling when dealing with large query responses.

Lars and Simon's previous site was romanatic.com. It will be interesting to see if they have any kind of cross-linking planned for the two sites. Currently Romanatic lets users search WildWinds and CoinArchives, and I'd expect an acsearch.info link can't be far away. It will be more interesting to see if they can come up with a way to automatically generate links from acsearch.info results to scholarly information on Romanatic.

CoinArchives.com to become a pay site

The great research tool, CoinArchives.com has removed 93% of it's content. A new pay site, CoinArchives Pro, will offer the old content. The new site has a $600/year subscription fee.

$600/year is a lot to host other peoples images and offer text searching over other people's text. I hope that the new venture is so successful that it inspires many imitators to offer better content at lower prices. (Meaning I lack the ability to explain to my wife where $600 goes every year, but maybe someone else will sell me access to old catalogs for $30/year).

CoinArchives Pro access might be worth this kind of money. We are talking 750,000 coin records. Compare to a full set of BMC Greek that costs $3000 and has only about 30,000 coins. I'm not saying CoinArchives Pro isn't worth $6000 for a decade of access, just that it will be tight budget-wise for me to find the money.

I wonder if the glossy catalog dealers, who produce catalogs at a loss for their customers, will see a jump in subscriptions because of this move?

ISEGRIM back

ISEGRIM is back at a new location, http://isegrim.dasr.de/isegrim/anmelden.html.

For those who have never seen it, ISEGRIM is a complicated search engine over ancient coins from Asia Minor in the world's collections. It has no pictures. It can be cryptic to use because of it's 1980s-style text-based query language that uses German abbreviations. FORVM user Archivum has written a user's guide. The format is similar to Otfried von Vacano's Typenkatalog der antiken Münzen Kleinasiens (1986).

(via FORVM)

Laurens van der Maaten's automatic recognition of coins

RJO and Peter Tompa wrote to let me know about a press release, Computer Recognizes Archaeological Material And Fake Van Goghs by NWO (Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research).

The press release discusses the PhD thesis of computer vision researcher Laurens van der Maaten. Via Google, I learned that last week van der Maaten defended his PhD thesis Feature Extraction from Visual Data in conjunction with a symposium on 'dimensionality reduction'.

His personal web site allows download of Matlab extensions that implement his techniques and a technical report on how to use it.

I wrote to Dr. van der Maaten who provided me with an paper, “A New System for the Classification of Modern and Historical Coins”. The historical coin portion of the paper discusses an experiment using 4822 Merovingen coins from the Dutch Money and Bank Museum (AKA The Netherlands Mint Museum or Het Nederlands Muntmuseum.) The researchers (van der Maaten, Paul Boon, and Eric Postma) trained their computer using the Merovingen coins and then fed 50 different Merovingen coins into the system. The goal was to find coins “perceptually similar” in the training database. The image above is taken from that paper (and modified by me to show a single row of pairs.)

So, rather than trying to identify the ruler or inscription, the task was to find coins that looked similar in the opinion of 10 non-numismatist humans. The paper reports that the computer got 20% right "magnitude", 43% right "orientation". I think orientation was figuring out how to orient the coin (right-side-up) but I am not certain.

The research was supported by NOW/CATCH, a Netherlands program to develop innovative tools for accessing cultural heritage.

In a personal email, Dr. van der Maaten reported that in a database of 4000 Roman coins the computer got a good match for 50% of the queries. I assume the criterion are similar, a match that looks perceptually similar to non-numismatists, such as a similar imperial portrait facing in the same direction. The Roman database used in the experiments is online, RICH: Reading Images for the Cultural Heritage. (I was previously unaware of this database and encourage Roman coin collectors to try it out and send me their thoughts in the collection, and its presentation and web interface.)

A success rate of 20% to 50% doesn't sound great but it is pretty impressive! As with the COINS results discussed on this blog, I am curious to see if statistical problems boosted the success rate. Most Roman coins feature a man's head facing right on their obverses. A system that classified EVERY image as a man facing right might be rated as 25% success by non-experts. I look forward to the publication of the Roman results in detail.

An image and 38 second video of the Roman coin recognition can be seen here. It is either a silent movie or my PC doesn't have the right version of Quicktime to play the sound.

Greek and Roman Coins from the du Chastel Collection

I recently won a copy of Greek and Roman Coins from the du Chastel Collection (Callataÿ & Heesch, Spink: London, 1999). Originally published at £60.00, it's now remaindered for £20 (about $33) from Spink. I got mine on eBay from Charles Davis who still starts auctions below wholesale.

It's a well-researched and well-made catalog of mostly Greek coins. The 41 plates are great. The 819 coins, collected by count du Chastel are all exceptional. Unfortunately in numismatic publishing, mere quality does not translate into sales. It's hard to compete with free color dealer catalogs. The best book in a category, such as Roman Republican Coinage (still in print at $490!) or Roman Provincial Coinage can move copies at high prices, while the second-best book doesn't move at all unless heavily discounted.

du Chastel is great but it's best feature is the superb dust jacket. The dust jacket photograph, by Stephen Sack, is the best I've ever seen on a coin catalog. It's an extreme closeup of the reverse of a sestertius of Nero, featuring the emperor on horseback. Sack manages to get an 8” picture out of the center of a 35mm coin that looks like an artistic masterpiece of detail and patina and light.



The image isn't photoshopped. My understanding is that he spent months looking at hundreds of worn bronzes with interesting patinas under a microscope looking for the textures and images that eventually make it into his work.

Sack had a show of his fine-art coin photography at the British Museum. The catalog, Metal Mirror: Coin Photographs by Stephen Sack is mind-blowing. Although I missed the London premiere I saw the pieces at Ariel Meyerowitz Gallery in New York. Very impressive.

I believe the Ariel Meyerowitz Gallery is gone but a few of Sacks' coin works can are available on VCoins, like this peacock and this goddess.

I can't afford a €4,000.00 picture of a peacock no matter how much I might want it, though. I bought a second copy of the catalog intending to dismember it and mount several images in 8x10 frames. I couldn't bring myself to take the blade to the duplicate catalog, though!

Robotic coin dealers coming to Europe?

James Wilson's strangely-titled report, “Germans taste machines with Midas touch” for the Financial Times says

... Germans will soon be able to sate their appetite for the yellow metal as easily as buying a chocolate bar after plans were announced on Tuesday to install gold vending machines in airports and railway stations across the country.

...

A prototype vending machine on display in Frankfurt Airport on Tuesday appeared to be a converted version of the dispensers typically used to sell snacks. For €30 airport shoppers could buy a 1g wafer of gold, with a larger 10g bar priced on Tuesday at €245 and gold coins also on sale.

...

When the Financial Times bought the cheapest product it was dispensed in an oblong metal box labelled “My Golden Treasure”, with a certificate of authenticity signed by Mr. Geissler but no receipt and the wrong change. Mr. Geissler said he hoped to have a more advanced prototype available this month.

...

Numismata graeca: Greek coin-types, classified for immediate identification

Leo Anson's 1910-1916 work, Numismata graeca: Greek coin-types, classified for immediate identification, is now available from archive.org.

This book attempts to publish a catalog of all Greek coins ordered by types. This makes it a useful work for identifying coins of unknown cities, especially those lacking inscriptions. 150 plates!

The work is similar to Richard Plant's Greek Coin Types and their Identification but it uses photos rather than drawings, doesn't illustrate all types, and doesn't index animal or god types.

Fakes of US coins getting better?

F. Michael Fazzari, “Chinese Fakes Get Harder to Spot Over Time”:

...

Today, excellent copies of U.S. Trade dollars and Flowing Hair dollars have been reported. From what I have seen, a "second generation" of these fakes is very deceptive.

While most Chinese counterfeits, such as the Morgan dollar illustrated here, will not pass inspection by a knowledgeable numismatist, those fakes often do. This is especially true when their surfaces are chemically altered or cleaned to simulate age.

...

Software from COINS

I've written before about The COINS Project (Combat On-Line Illegal Numismatic Sales), a European Union sponsored effort “to enable the traceability of cultural heritage objects”. The project is developing “technologies aimed at allowing permanent identification and traceability of coins”.

COINS recently released software that attempts to compare and match coin photos against databases of coin photos. The newly released software comes in several pieces.

The key pieces are the Image Recognition Tool, said to be able to match a photograph against a database of coins, and the Shape Matching Package, which is apparently also for matching photos.

There is also a a web spider “to discover and identify stolen coins illegally sold on the internet” based on the open-source search engine Nutch. The spider comes with source code. It should robotically download all image files on a site and compare them against the database of coins. (My first reading of the search code did not impress me. I found code that looks for pages containing the word 'coin' or 'moneta' but I didn't find code to invoke image processing.) There is a user interface, which can be previewed here, for conducting simple searches of a coin database. For example, enter 'Alexander' in the simple query box, or 'eagle' in the iconographic query box. This Flash-based web interface is nothing special, and the spider's ability to search for stolen coins is only as effective as the photo-matching capabilities powering it.

A good image recognizer for ancient coins would be quite useful. It probably wouldn't help much to find particular categories of cultural property, such as ancient Cypriot and Chinese coins, as these are usually sold with descriptive text making photo recognition superfluous. Recognition technology would be useful to detectives for particular stolen coins and for computer-assisted die studies by numismatists.

I downloaded COINS' Image Recognition Tool (IRT) and loaded it with a database of 80 fake coins from my own photo-file. Although the IRT can compare images in popular formats such as JPEG the database only accepts greyscale TIFF files. I used Pierre Gougelet's free XnView to convert color JPEG files to greyscale TIFF.

I queried IRT using a fake image that wasn't in the database. I chose a cast fake Himera bronze, a type which gets past many dealers despite having been published as false in Wayne Sayles' Classical Deception. I had several of fakes from the same forger's mold in my database. The software coughed up five possible matches, with the highest being another coin of this type! (The other offered matches made little sense and were ranked poorly by the software.)

That seems like impressive performance. However, my database is small. Only 43 coins, or about half of the 80 coin database, correctly segmented as round. The other half of samples weren't exacted from the patterned background. Backgrounds that a human wouldn't even see, such as a finger, are not detected as expected by IRT.



The 4 non-zero matches returned in my first try represent 10% of the 43 coins whose edges were detected. Obviously a matcher that thinks 10% of the database matches a particular specimen is not yet trustworthy enough to assist law enforcement. Furthermore, the coin I first checked is a cast fake, so the geometry of the edge should help the software to detect matches more easily.

Oddly, the edge geometry didn't play a role. Although the correct match was found, the system believed a 60 degree rotation was needed. Actually the coins had the same orientation! (The picture at the top of this post is of this match.)

I tried genuine coins of different types than the fakes and got many false positives. The strength of the match is reported by IRT in the 'Matches' field. The two identical casts got 17 matches; a Ptolemaic bronze got 8 matches a shipping envelop with an eBay logo. I don't know what number is considered by the COINS scientists to be a good match.


I've just started playing with this software. I will try the Shape Matching Package next and report here on its accuracy. I invite other collectors experimenting with this software leave a comment on this post describing your success or failure matching coins using COINS' tools.

Ron Landis' Athenian dekadrachm

American engraver Ron Landis is well known in hobo nickel circles but his replicas of ancient coins have attracted little attention. I could not find his Athenian dekadrachm replica in Fischer-Bossert's The Athenian Decadrachm.

Landis engraved dies for Athenian dekadrachms, tetradrachms, and didrachms. According to Dr. Lawrence J. Lee World Coins & Medals, Landis' company Gallery Mint Museum minted quantities “in the upper hundreds” (I believe in 2000). In 2007 Lee's company restruck “no more than 100 of any denomination”.

The Gallery Mint Museum closed in 2005. Photos of Landis and the manufacturing equipment can be seen at Arkansas Road Stories.

At least one “dekadrachm” was struck in gold, weighing 3.4 troy oz (or 106g!)

Ron Landis apparently described his engraving technique in “Hand engraving and die sinking”, published by the ANS in Coinage of the Americas Conference: The medal in America (vol. 2, 1997). (Has anyone seen this? I do not have a copy.)



UPDATE: Dr. Wolfgang Fischer-Bossert wrote to remind us that his book does not include fantasies that are neither dangerous nor meant to deceive.

BMC Arabia

George Hill's BMC Arabia, the Arabian Greek coins in the British Museum collection, has been scanned and is available for download from the Internet Archive (formerly the Million Book Project).

(via Digital Library NUMIS)

I'm surprised they put this up; George Hill died 60 years ago and thus his works are not public domain in the UK, and since the book was never published in the USA the law binds servers here to UK rules.

Antique coin forger sentenced to six months jail

The London Metropolitan Police report that David Hutchings, 43, unemployed of Cross Street, Nuneaton, Warwickshire, plead guilty at Warwick Crown Court on March 16, 2009.

... Hutchings claimed to be an avid metal detectorist who had found the coins at various times and locations....

Hutchings' defence throughout police interviews and at court, was that he bought the coins from two dealers 'Gary and Steve' believing they were all genuine. However, he was unable to identify either dealers whereabouts.

Also found at Hutchings' home address during the search were a number of real coins, believed to have been used as a base for test striking during the manufacture of some of the fake coins.

Experts from the British Museum and Fitzwilliam Museum assessed the coins recovered as part of this case and concluded that all had either been manufactured by casting in a mould or struck using forged dies.

Detective Constable Ian Lawson from the Met's Art & Antiques Unit said: "Whilst the overall value of these coins is relatively low, the level of deception and harm Hutchings has caused the individuals and businesses embroiled in his lies is significant.

(Via a post by Dave Welsh on Unidroit-L and Ancientartifacts.)

Found in the crop of a chicken

John Hooker posted on Moneta-L the story of a Celtic coin found in the crop of a chicken.

(The crop is a pouch in a bird's neck that temporarily stores food.)

The chicken came from Iceni territory, but the coin is Catuvellauni perhaps it ate the coin while visiting a poultry show in Hertfordshire?

Artifact forgery

An article by John Timmer on Ars Techica discusses the recent article, Forging Ahead, by Charles Stanish in Archaeology.

Charles Stanish writes

In an antiquities store in La Paz, I recently saw about four shelves of supposed Tiwanaku (ca. A.D. 400-1000) pottery. I told the owner that most were fakes and she became irritated and called me a liar. So I simply touched one at a time, saying "fake," "real," "real from Tiwanaku," "fake," "fake made by Eugenio in Fuerabamba," and so forth. She paused for a moment, pulled one down that I said was real, and told me that it was also a fake. I congratulated her on the fact that her fakes were getting better and she just smiled. My mistake is an instance of what San Francisco State University archaeologist Karen Olsen Bruhns has identified as a very real problem—the experts who study the objects are sometimes being trained on fakes. As a result, they may authenticate pieces that are not real.

The article mostly discusses South American antiquities. There is nothing about coins.

Google's patent on an improvement in book scanning

Maureen Clements blogs about Google's patent on book scanning. Google shines infrared light on the pages; open the brightness of the reflected light can be used to determine the angle for that part of the page.

My earlier post on this subject: Book Fold Coorection.

(via bOING bOING)

Sports collectable authentication

John Branch covers baseball authentication for The New York Times:

Nothing is too mundane to be authenticated, if deemed potentially valuable. Cans of insect repellent used to combat the midges that swarmed the 2007 playoffs in Cleveland were authenticated. So were urinals pulled from the old Busch Stadium in St. Louis and office equipment from since-razed Veterans Stadium in Philadelphia. The Phillies are cutting the clubhouse carpet from last season into authenticated 18-by-24-inch mats.

...

About three million items have been authenticated by M.L.B. since 2001.

...

With Yankee Stadium emptied after the opening 10-2 loss to Cleveland, Lubrano watched groundskeepers shovel dirt from the mound and home plate into five-gallon buckets. Lubrano sealed the lids with tape, then stuck holograms on each bucket, lid and seal. The dirt will be divided into small containers at a warehouse, in front of an authenticator.

The article doesn't mention what happens to the dirt. It's put into “Infield Dirt coins”.

(via Market Design and Marginal Revolution.)

Pergamon tetradrachms

This stater of Pergamon has a small Medusa head in the right field. The ΠΕΡ monogram in the left field provides the attribution.

This coin is large, 27mm, and the Medusa head is about 5mm across. I recall F.S. Kleiner & S.P. Noe (The Early Cistophoric Coinage (1977)) date tetradrachms with this symbol to 135-128 BC. I suspect the Medusa head symbol is very scarce. There are none on CoinArchives and this is the only one I was able to spot on eBay. This specimen is reputedly from a 1995 Empire Coins list but I haven't been able to verify.

I don't know if anyone has speculated on the meanings of the symbols on these tetradrachms. I don't have my own copy of Kleiner-Noe but they did not speculate on the Medusa head.

I suspect the Medusa head symbol is related to the head on the very rare Medusa tetradrachms usually attributed to Pergamon.

This coin, which is not in my collection, is the largest silver coin made by the Greeks depicting Medusa (by size; the weight is no greater than the archaic Athenian Wappenmuenzen).

Those tetradrachms, of which only three are known (in Copenhagen, Paris, and the BM), have the inscription ΑΘΗΝΑΣ / ΝΙΚΗΦΟΡΟΥ. Although only three are known mystery of the attribution and the magnificence of the engraving has inspired several articles on them and much creative thinking.

Antonia S. Faita (“The Medusa-Athena Nikephoros Coin from Pergamon”, Athena in the Classical World (2001) argues the balls on Athena, which previous writers believed were female breasts, actually represent the cities of an economic union. She writes “Athena Nikephoros ... wears an apron with seven balls, the largest one in the centre. Her left hand holds a branch with seven leafy shoots. The balls could not possibly have represented breasts, symbols of a fertility cult, as they lack the most important element of fertility, the nipples. The absence of these spherical globes from representations of Athena Nikephoros on coins dated to the Roman period clearly indicates that the globes were not depicted on the goddess’s cult statue. The globes on Athena’s pinafore are placed on an apron tied around her waist far to low to be considered breasts. The equal number of balls and shoots may well mean they alluded to the same idea.” ... “The central ball on the goddess’s apron, being the largest, represented the capital Pergamon, the seat of Attalid power; the other six, the remaining cities issuing cistophoroi.”

Paper money into art

I promise to get back to posting pictures of ancient coins, but in the meantime...

Mark Wagner makes dollar bill collages.

... In the studio we keep hoppers of bills separated into parts to use piece by piece as well as binders of prepared texture swatches and collaged passages to add wholesale. I love all the process. For some of the collages we track how many scraps of paper are glued down. I see that sort of accounting as an interesting extension of the material. When “Liberty” is complete, for example, we’ll be able give statistics on each of her 13 panels individually, and also say that the whole thing took 1234 bills cut into 54,234 pieces, or whatever, and here’s all the scraps we didn’t use.

(via Freakonomics Blog).

Publishers don't know what rights they have

Mike Shatzkin blogs about a serious issue for big publishers, their inability to remember what they have the rights to publish. (via TeleRead).

I ran into this when I wanted to 'reprint', on my web site, Admiral Dodson's COINage articles 'Counterfeits I Have Known'. COINage graciously gave me permission to reprint the text, but not the pictures. COINage didn't know if it had the right to let me do that! Luckily the photographer, the famous Ken Bresset, allowed me to use his pictures of the fakes. (I did not attempt to contact the Athens Police Department for permission to use the crime scene photos, nor the nephew of Christodoulos who engraved the fakes.)

Last year Google settled with the Author's Guild. The Guild agreed not to sue Google for publishing works as long as Google tries to get money to authors. This sounds great, but it's being challenged by Consumer Watchdog who claims that it isn't fair for Google to be the only company immune from Authors Guild lawsuits. It's not clear to me what Consumer Watchdog wants. Do they want the Authors Guild to offer a program where companies can pay not to be sued by the Guild? Google is still on the hook for lawsuits, but supposedly no one other than the Guild can mount a credible lawsuit.

India seeks new Rupee symbol

A BBC story (one month old) by Kathryn Westcott reports on India's search for an new recognizable currency symbol for the Rupee.

India would not want a symbol that looked bad when it was turned upside down, [Jasmine Montgomery of design consultancy FutureBrand] says - "like someone's bottom," for example.

Wikipedia reports that there are already several Rupee signs, including ₨ (that's one symbol in Unicode, not an R followed by a p) and रू. The symbol रू confuses me; I don't know how to look it up; perhaps it is the “devanagari letter ra” followed by the “devanagari vowel sign uu”.

Unicode includes other varients like ৳ the Bengali Rupee symbol.

The Economic Times lets the reader vote from 19 choices. All of those choices look something like the Latin letter R. I think India could assert its new status as an economic power house by not bowing to European fonts and insist on making the West use a two-character glyph from an Indian font: रू.

CNG 81 Auction up

CNG Mail Bid Sale 81 is up on the CNG home page. Over 2000 ancient coins, including 921 Peloponnesian lots called BCD Peloponnesos II. Electronic Auction 209 is also up, with nearly 500 lots of ancients.

“Older” (1970s) struck counterfeits

F. Michael Fazzari's short article “Counterfeiters and Authenticators Do Battle” from Numismatic News discusses the characteristics of fakes struck from transfer dies.

... readers old enough to remember in 1975 how well the fakers could replicate the tiny die polish lines found on genuine coins would be astounded by today's work.

Recommended!

cgb.fr Monnaies 38 catalog up

The cgb.fr auction catalog Monnaies 38 is up. 1705 lots, including this unique stater from Phaphos, ex Santa Barbara Museum Collection.

LHS auction 103 catalog up

The catalog for LHS auction 103 is up. 145 Greek Lots, 99 Roman, 6 Celtic.

A highlight, for me, is lot 96, a rare gorgon stater from Melos. Most Greek coins with gorgoneions are small but this weights over 14 grams. Unfortunately, the estimate of CHF10000 means I'm out of the running this time around.

Gorgon/helmet

Many of the coins in my collection are very small. Here is the obverse of a gorgon/helmet fraction. I cannot find my scan of the reverse (and of course the coin is in the safety deposit box.)

The coin is 6.5mm in diameter and weighs 0.22g. The reverse type can be seen on this example on CoinArchives. Although LHS attributed the coin to Maroneia an example from M&M appears to have the letters O-Π in the corners suggesting NEOΠ or Neapolis.

Collectors of ancients often praise the engraving skills of the ancients but look how small the statue of Lincoln in the memorial is! (It was mechanically reduced, of course.)

Pegasos/gorgon

I love the expression on this gorgon's face. I bought this obol in 2001 from Lanz's auction of Mr. BCD's Corinth collection. I'm very happy that my example of this coin comes from my favorite die of the type. It's a tiny coin; just 10mm across.

My version is a later example. I'm guessing it was made between 400 BC and the Macedonian occupation of 338 BC.

The earlier coinage featured a stern gorgon in an incuse square with the letters TRIH, for trihemiobol, in the corners. Although E. M. Cousinery attributed an example of this coin to Corinth in 1825 a paper by H. P. Borrell in the Numismatic Chronicle of 1840 argued for Tiridia in Thrace, a city with no known coinage, based on Borrell's misunderstanding of the inscription.

The same type was struck by Anaktorion, Leukas, and Medeon in Akarnania. The attribution to Medeon isn't secure; the M could be for Metropolis, Mesma, or it could be a Σ on it's side. It would be nice to assemble a set of these by mints but I probably won't live long enough. Coins of Medeon are rare! A note in the BCD auction (Akarnanien, October 2007) for a stater of Medeon says it is the only silver coin from that city to appear on the market during the last 40 years.

Make your own coins

You can own Nevada Coin Minting for $950,000 (or the best offer over $250,000). For your money you get to run tokens.com, usmint.net, a 360 ton coining press, over a million blanks, a coin conveyer belt, furnaces, pantographes, coin washing and drying machines, a centrifugal casting machine, and two US patents on coin colorization.

(The offer is from late 2007 I don't know if it is still good.)

You also get a Gaming Control Board approved portable destruction machine. “In the past old tokens were thrown into cement, Lake Mead, or taken to scrap yards to be destroyed, which caused unnecessary expenditures of time and money to ensure that security was properly maintained. With the machinery that was developed by NCM we can destroy approximately 900 coins a minute per machine in the casino’s cage...”

Gorgon/cow

Alfredo asked to see some favorites from my collection. This coin is a large-ish and heavy (21mm; 10.7g) bronze of Parion. It's similar in style to the common gorgon/cow hemidrachms.

I was the underbidder in the Dr. Busso Peus Nachfolger auction, October 2003. After I lost I regretted it and felt I should have bid higher. So I was very excited to see this coin turn up again in Ed Waddell's trays at the New York show a few months later for not much more the high bid plus juice. I have been able to trace this coin back to a Bankhaus H. Aufhaeuser auction in October 1988.

Parion struck bronze gorgons with several reverse types. The only one that shows up with any frequency is the eagle. The cow type appears in three sizes. The large size shown here has the most primitive appearance and is probably the earliest. The middle size lacks the protruding tongue and the gorgon seems more human. I recall von Aulock describing the type middle type as depicting Athena, but on the best specimens like this CNG example there are faint snake-ties below the chin. The smallest size gorgon/cow is quite rare — I only know of the specimen in the BM catalog.

So when was it struck? I don't trust published dates for bronzes of Parion. Warwick Wroth divided the BM's Parion pieces into '350-300 or later' and 'Circ. 200 - Augustus' categories. Putting "or later" into a date range is a bit weaselly. And what did the good citizens used from 300 to 200 BC? Parion's neighbors were striking bronze as early as 440 BC (Pergamon) and 400 BC (Kyzikos). My best guess is that both this coin and the hemidrachms date no earlier than 360 BC when Parion was conquered by Iphiades of Abydos.

Gorgon/blank

On a recent suggestion thread Kevin expressed an interested in my collection.

I am collecting ancient coins depicting gorgons. I hope to write a book about them someday. (I have extensive notes towards that end.) If anyone has a coin with a gorgon they can't identify send it my way for a free ID or a chance to be in a book. Dealer inquiries encouraged.

Recently I purchased a tiny fraction on eBay. 0.21g, 7mm, and thin. I'm not sure what it is. The seller attributed it as Selge so I'm assuming he thinks it came from southern Turkey.

My hunch is that it matches a unique (or formerly unique) fraction published in SNG Levante and attributed by Edoardo Levante to Kelenderis. That piece weighs only half as much and may lack the beaded border so I am not certain. Selge and Kelenderis are fairly close geographically.

Perhaps the coin is merely blank due to heavy wear? Last year I bought a coin that appeared to have a strange blank reverse from a VCoins dealer but it turned out to just be a damaged image of Athena on a non-rare coin usually attributed to "Selge or Aspendos".

If Levante knew the provenance of his coin he didn't say. A blank side is unusual in Greek coins. Nearby Selge has a lion/blank type (very rare; in the Paris collection). There are also gorgon fractions and a unique stater attributed to Selge but the attributions are somewhat dubious. As far as I can tell the common attribution of numerous gorgon types to Selge rests upon a coin in the BM with inscription "ΣΤ" in the Pisidian language and some coffins Waddington saw in the 1850s. I don't know what a "Τ" is doing in the name Selge but then I don't speak Pisidian!

Cities proposed for the gorgon/Athena fractions are Aspendos (by George Hill), Selge (by Waddington), Etenna (by Imhoof-Blumer), and Side (by Imhoof-Blumer).

Argentine professor faces prison time for posting unofficial translations of out of print Derrida texts

A philosophy professor at Universidad Nacional de Lanús in Argentina faces possible jail time for posting translations of out of print books.

Most of these texts were out of print, or had never been translated. Now a publisher is bringing a few of these books into Argentina, and they're trying to get this prof imprisoned for supporting Derrida while he was unavailable.

(via bOING bOING, which links to Spanish-language story.)

American law probably isn't so strict, but the ethical issues are similar. What should be the penalty for translating out-of-print technical books?

R. Goldsborough recently posted on this subject to the e-Sylum. He queried five lawyers, 40% of whom said Tsvi Rogin's proposed translation of Problemeder frühen Elektronprägung could be illegal. Reid concluded that the legality of unauthorized uncommercial translations haven't been tested by the courts and violate no laws until the courts decide the matter.

I would be unwilling to be the test case! I figure if 40% of lawyers think something is illegal I'm likely to get a judge who agrees. I'm certain Goldsborough is wrong but it's similar to the old saw about foul balls and umpires. Does the umpire call the ball because it's foul, or does the umpire calling the ball make it foul? If calling a ball makes it foul then Reid is right and I am wrong.

Journal of Ancient Numismatics 3

Volume 3 of Alfredo de la Fe's Journal of Ancient Numismatics is online, with contributions by David Vagi, Curtis Clay, Georges Depeyrot and others.

Rare Greek portrait coins: Thraso

The Wikipedia entry for the Indo-Greek king Thraso describes his coinage:

... in a style similar to those of Menander I, has the same type of Athena, and shares one of Menander's mint marks. On the coin, the title of Thraso is "Basileus Megas" ("Great King"), a title which only Eucratides the Great had dared take before him and which is seemingly misplaced on the young boy Thraso ...

The Thraso coin has never been photographed. Wikipedia cites R. C. Senior, Decline of the Indo-Greeks (1998) and says "The coin belonged to a secretive coin-collector, who did not allow Senior to photograph it, and it remains unpublished."

Not only is the coin unpublished, it may represent a portrait of Thraso whose appearance is otherwise unknown. The bronze coinage of Menander is described as having Athena's head on the obverse. This description comes from James Prinsep (“New Types of Bactrian and Indo-Scythic Coins, Engraved as Pl. XXXII”, Essays on Indian antiquities vol. 1 (1858), p. 399). Prinsep named the obverse bust as “Athena” and this has stuck although the features greatly resemble those of Menander himself!

Not to scale. The coin on the left depicts “Athena”, the right Menander. That Athena sure looks a lot like the first Greek Buddhist king.

(Images used without permission, but are from cngcoins.com, the the tetradrachm is available in CNG's web store.)

Why so quiet lately?

A Gift for Polydektes uses sitemeter.com to track readers. I get about 30-35 visitors a day. It provides a free cute map telling where readers are from and what link they clicked to visit.

The last forty visitors breaks down like this: 13 from unknown (bookmarks&bots), 19 from Google searches (mostly related to the topics I discuss!), 3 from Yahoo search, 2 from links on my web site and two from other blogs (moneta-l-bloggers and A Survey of Ancient Coins).

So I'm getting readers -- that's great. I was hoping this medium would be more interactive and I'm slightly concerned that no one has commented on my last 14 posts. I was wondering what kind of posts would get more reader interaction? The only person who responds regularly is Wayne Homren, who responds through his own popular meta-blog the e-Sylum.

Reader survey: What kind of posts would you be willing to respond to? Book/site reviews? Dealer interviews? Digitization and computer stuff? Fakes? Other? Guest co-bloggers? How about 'open threads' where you can post your own questions or promote your own web site?

Texture analysis of ancient coins with TOF neutron diffraction

Frank Kovacs contributed to a paper, “Texture analysis of ancient coins with TOF neutron diffraction” (along with Yanxia Xie, L. Lutterotti and H. R. Wenk) for the Journal of Materials Science (2004).

The scientists compare a Black Sea Hoard coin, usually called fake, from Mesembria with a genuine example. The paper calls them hemiobols but they look like diobols.

... neither with phase proportions nor texture patterns can we distinguish between the two coins. The observed texture is consistent with ancient practice to produce coins by striking between two dies..... Therefore, no conclusions can be drawn about the authenticity of the coins....

(via the Science & Coins page on the Robert Matthews Coin Authentication site.)

Nomos AG auction 1

The catalog for the upcoming (May 6th) Nomos auction 1 is up at SixBid.com.

Nomos AG is the re-established coin company directed by Alan Walker (formerly of Leu/LHS).

The catalog features 132 amazing Greek coins including two Akragas tetradrachms and a Naxos tetradrachm. (Actualy 135 coins — lot 6 is a hoard of four coins found in a river inside a small bronze box.) The picture above is a rare Tenedos didrachm. There are also Roman coins, including many gold lots.

What does $1 trillion dollars look like?

Someone on PageTutor.com has created cartoons of what various piles of money look like, including $1,000,000,000,000 (one of the stimulus amounts).

Apparently Google SketchUp was used to make the images.

(via bOING bOING)

Incredibly Strange Appraisal Mathematics

News-Antique.com reports on the Tamoikins, who have Solved the Last Unregulated Marked of Art, Antiquity, and Collectables!

A 107 page PDF by Dmitriy and Mikhail Tamoikin (of the Tamoikin Family Museum apparently of Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada) explains the solution.

With Method TES any trained customs officer can make an independent appraisal of any item. If the owner already has a TES appraisal the officer can check its legitimacy and personally audit the entire process. Complete Item Information Document stores all known information about the item in a user friendly format allowing any person without training fully understand what is written in the document and how relevant that information is. Secure Item Identification System (SIIS) provides a unique identity to an item so that even identical copies are easily told apart and the issue of authenticity becomes no longer a problem. Finally all information is registered in what will become a Unified National Database giving policing agencies an incredible tool against art crime.

...

Tamoikins Knowledge Institute totally solved the problem of lending money for art, antiquity and collectibles opening to the banks and wide public a completely new money lending sector! How? By providing the banking industry everything it needs to safely lend money to everyone regardless of their social status. If a person is of adult age and has no problems acquiring a credit card, he or she can use personally owned art, antiquity and collectibles as collateral to borrow money!

There is also a Russian Patent, filed in 2005, Method for Evaluating Collectibles and Device for Carrying out Said Method.