Looking at the early cruciform die over time

Several things make studying the reverse “Parion” dies challenging.

It is a simple geometric design, and the die cutters are cutting new dies to imitate the old. In this example, the design is very similar. The lines on the right are thicker, but this will happen as the die degrades. The die on the left could have had an additional line cut and then degraded to the line on the right. I don't believe that is what happened. I believe the die on the left deteriorated into a different shape, and then a new die was made copying the old.

The die is either soft or in use for a long time and slowly degrading. The die on the left degraded into the die on the right, and they kept using it.

The die cutters are tracing and enlarging die cracks. Here we see two impressions that look dissimilar, but I believe are from the same die, and closely related in time. The ancients seem to be widening either cracks or lines they traced themselves. I don't know if this technique would stop the crack from spreading.

Fakes. There are some casts out there. There are also some coins that seem to be unrelated to the main group. It is unclear if these are from short-lived dies, are ancient counterfeits, or are modern counterfeits.

I believe the reverse die I have been studying struck some of the earliest specimens. I could be completely wrong. It could merely be of poor style and soft. But it seems to be connected to the least-degraded obverses, and obverses of the most archaic style.

Archaic gorgon/incuse drachms said to be minted at Parion

(Price and Waggoner, Archaic Greek Coinage: the Asyut hoard, #612)

One of the most common archaic Greek coin types is the gorgon/incuse type. Unfortunately very little has been written about it. Poor specimens are common. Common and ugly coin types can be overlooked, especially without a story backed by a literary source. A very rare and beautiful coin might get several papers speculating upon its origin, even if only a few are known and it had little economic significance at the time. These gorgon/incuse types, which must have played a big role in someone's economy 2500 years ago, are nearly ignored by English-language scholarship. Perhaps this is because nearly all of the 60+ specimens currently offered coin collecting sites are wretched.

In 475 BC someone buried many silver coins near Asyut in Egypt, including the coin I show above. So we know the type was circulating in 475 BC. But where? The Asyut hoard contained only one specimen mixed with coins from all over the Mediterranean. The hoard evidence for this coinage is surprisingly is slim for such a common type in the coin trade. The editors of An Inventory of Greek Coin Hoards cite just six hoards. No hoards including the type were found anywhere near Parion in Mysia, the supposed mint city given by every cataloger for the past 100 years.

Furthermore, the hoard evidence is a bit muddled because these coins come in three fabrics. The vast majority have a medium-thick flan and relatively low-relief gorgoneion with soft features. Medium-thick examples typically weigh 3.1-3.4g There is also a very thick type, with sloping sides, weighing 3.5-4.0g. Finally we have light specimens of a thin cupped fabric. For the hoards other than the one buried at Asyut we don't know which variety are being discussed. This is important because the fabric, style, and weights of the three types are so vastly different that we don't know if they are from the same period and mint.

I have attempted to do a die study of the very-thick specimens. I will post my preliminary results here soon. I have been hesitant to post, because what I am seeing is so strange, but there are so few specimens of very thick fabric examples that it seems pointless to sit on the data waiting for confirmation.

I also have a proposal for a mint city that makes a much better candidate than Parion. I had thought it was my own idea, but after much research learned it had been proposed in the early 19th century.

I have always been interested in the type but I recently had a chance to inspect the specimen from the Roland Maly collection. Maly's example looks artistically superior to most other examples. I believe it is from an early state of perhaps the first die. In upcoming posts I will attempt to show why I believe that.

A token with strange script

Four months ago a user on the forum /r/coins posted a machine-struck token or coin with an unusual inscription.

I cannot identify the script. It seems like each letter (or syllable) is made up of one or two parts of a square plus a curve. That's unusual. It doesn't show up in any of the examples my browser can render in Wikipedias list of writing systems. Because of the lines+curve nature of the script I was thinking an alphasyllabary script or the 'Phags-pa Mongolian script. I thought it looks a little like Tamil but not really.

One side depicts what appears to be a club. The other sign shows a bird, probably a falcon, carrying something odd-shaped. The shape in the eagle's talons could just represent a rock or something but I am thinking perhaps an outline of an island or province. The style of art used to depict the bird is unusual. No coin relief, no feathers. Just a line drawing with simplified wings really. That's unusual … most coin artists like to show off by doing really detailed feathers.

I do not have the item in-hand and I don't know the size, weight, or composition.

I don't believe this is a real coin. For a while I thought it might be a fantasy coin or micro-nation. Maybe it is just designed to confuse. I am posting it here because we all love a mystery once in a while.

The Colouring, Bronzing and Patination of Metals

An impressive book on finishing metals is Richard Hughes and Michael Rowe's 1982 The Colouring, Bronzing, and Patination of Metals.

It's a big book. It begins with a 13 page Historical Introduction which covers metal finishing in ancient China, Greece, and Rome, throughout history up to the present day. The surface enrichment of coins is briefly mentioned. There is an extensive bibliography.

The next section is a 23 page discussion of how to actually color metal objects. This is followed by 16 color plates. The plates are quite beautiful in the 1991 Watson-Guptill edition that I borrowed from the New York Public Library. (I have not seen the other editions.)

The bulk of the book is a 250-page section of chemical recipes to get the various color effects. These are historical recipes, which the authors personally carried out “with the exception of a few potentially very hazardous recipes”. Modern chemical names are used for the ingredients. The recipes are dense, four or five to a page, arranged by the desired color of the finished product. For anyone carrying out the recipes, there is an 18 page section on Safety.

The patination technique used by Italian antiquities forgers that I mentioned in March that used Copper Sulfate, Nitric Acid, and Ammonium Choride did not appear in the book (or if it did, I missed it in the hundreds of recipes). Recipe 3.213 (the 213th recipe in the Copper section includes Copper Sulfate and Ammonium Chloride, but used Ferrous Sulfate instead of Nitric Acid. There were several recipes with Nitric acid, such as 1.40, 1.120, 2.29, and 3.132, but not many (perhaps because of its poisonous and corrosive nature). The recipes that did include Nitric Acid combined it with Copper Nitrate rather than Copper Sulfate.

It would be fun to experiment with the patina recipes, perhaps on modern copper coins, but I lack the time to embark on such a project and it probably isn't a good idea to keep such chemicals around the house. If anyone reading the blog has skill in this field and would like my to link to their site or to guest-post here on the topic of producing patinas just let me know.

Form CN 22

This is a completed form CN 22. It is supposed to be attached to the outside of international envelopes containing anything other than letters. This one was attached to an envelope which contained an Indian token I won for ₹220 (about US$3.46) in an eBay.in auction.

I've noticed that coins sent from India always have such a declaration. I recently received a 2013 coin from Poland of similar value which did not have a declaration. About half of the low-value coins I receive from Europe seem to lack it.

According to the US Customs web site, a customs duty must be paid for all merchandise worth above $200. (Gold coins have an exception and there is no duty on them but they still need the forms). According to cpb.gov, you must pick up goods worth more than $2,500 in person. I have never imported coins at that level.

Sellers generally don't want to attach the declarations to packages with no duty, as the declarations themselves are believed to encourage theft. If there is no Customs Duty to be paid or high-value reporting requirement it seems a pointless theft risk to affix a declaration. US Customs x-rays the envelops and will open them if it looks like duty might be needed. Yet the web site warns that the forms must be present accurate.

I was surprised to learn from cbp.gov that the weight of the item is expected. The form I show here does include it, but this is unusual in my limited experience. An this case the weight was not accurate: the token I received was about 1/3 the weight listed.

Mailing coins to and from Europe

The United States Customs Service sometimes seizes ancient coins sent through the mail.

My friend the Cultural Property Observer has been blogging about the legal issues around Customs seizures. I became curious about the statistical properties: how often are the coins seized, does it make a difference what is written on the Customs Declaration, and do the particular source and destination cities make a difference.

My hope had been to send a few coins with sub-$10 market value back and forth with a reader living in Poland to see what happens. It might be interesting to learn if MOU restrictions are being enforced uniformly or are biased.

Surprisingly, my correspondent's Polish Post Office told him US Customs doesn't accept coins sent through the mail. Even more surprisingly, the US Post Office's web site says coin shipments to Poland coins are prohibited by Poland.

I'm not talking about ancient coins. I mean coins and money in general, “including currency in circulation in the Polish Republic”, and silver.

I am curious to see how it this prohibition works in practice. I was unable to convince my Polish archeo-blogger correspondent to enter into an exchange of modern coins with me. Instead I purchased a 2 Złote commemorating the 50th Anniversary of the Polish Society for the Mentally Handicapped on eBay for $1.65 plus $3 shipping.

I purchased the coin on March 21st. It was postmarked March 25th. eBay expected it would arrive by April 24th to May 1st. The coin arrived a week early on April 13th. The seller did not declare the coin, so we didn't learn anything about shipping declared coins. I did learn it takes about three weeks for a thick coin-sized object in a Priorytet envelope with 360 Grozy of postage (about US 0.95) to reach New York.

My hope is that I didn't engage in smuggling through this transaction. I did everything above-board: I bought it publicly on eBay, paid with a credit card, received it at my legal residence via the US Postal Service. It was just an undeclared coin with a face value of US $0.53 and a collector value of $1.65. If anyone with a legal background knows otherwise please contact me via email.

If anyone with a Polish address is interested in receiving a few recent US coins from me, with full customs declaration, email me and tell me what kind of US coins you want. No charge. The coins might not arrive. My intention is to fill out declarations with variations of 'coins / gift / value ~$2' and 'numismatic / gift / value ~$2' and just see what gets refused and what gets seized. Anyone in?

Photo Certification from NGC Ancients

Numismatic Guaranty Corporation has been offering Third Party Grading of ancient coins for six years. Usually the company slabs the coins. I recently acquired two NGC-graded ancients that couldn't be slabbed. They came with laminated Photo Certificates.

The certificates are huge: 195mm x 120mm. I don't collect anything else this size and had no idea how to store the certificates with the coins. I finally found Supersafe 2 Pocket pages for Graded Currency which hold them and integrate well with a collection stored in a three-ring binder. Unfortunately these 2 Pocket pages don't have any kind of clasp or door and I will be nervous traveling with certificates in this kind of container.

Although the certificates are huge my smaller coin, a 1/64th stater weighing 0.14g, is exceptionally tiny. This coin is supposedly on good metal, with surfaces graded 4/5 by NGC, but blown up to the vast size of the photo certificate it looks painfully rough. I would have preferred a baseball-card sized photo certificate that could be stored in a safety deposit box. (If I had very large coins I expect large photo certificates, and it does make sense to standardize on a size. Just note that tiny coins that look good in hand may appear hideous when 6mm is blown up to 70mm).

As far as I can tell from the web site, photo certificates are only available for coins NGC is unwilling to slab. The web site authors seem not to have considered collectors who prefer the flexibility of certificates over the finality of slabs. I have no clue if it is possible to request only the certificate.

Each coin is given a unique serial number. Entering the number into a form on NGC's web site brings up photographs of the coin and the certificate. For example, my 1/64 stater can be seen at http://www.ngccoin.com/certlookup/index.aspx?CertNumber=2412827-016. This part of NGC's web site seems poor. There is no population data. The 'Pedigree' listed for my coin is 'rv eagle head r.', which is of course the reverse description, not the pedigree. (So far I have been unable to trace the pedigree of this particular coin myself beyond the auction I purchased it in.)

Laminated with the photograph is a hologram and a 'photo-certificate.' I would have expected the certificate to be intaglio printed but it looks computer printed.

The 1/64 stater came with tiny slip of paper saying 'NGC has not certified this coin' because of 'other' with 'size' written by hand. This paper is wrong: the coin was certified by NGC. The certificate team seems to lack slips saying 'NGC has not encapsulated this coin' and is repurposing 'reject' slips.

My other photo-certified coin, a plated obol, should be visible at http://www.ngccoin.com/certlookup/index.aspx?CertNumber=2412832-011 but it seems NGC did not upload the picture. The plated obol's photo-certificate includes the annotation 'ancient forgery' and this important information is not present on the verification page. I was happily surprised to learn the ancient counterfeits can be certified, as the web site claims 'NGC Ancients will only grade coins it believes to be genuine.' Leaving the forgery annotation off the web verification page seems like a major omission. It is also confusing to have a certificate that says 'ancient forgery' on one side and 'genuine, original' on the other, even though all serious collectors will understand what is meant.

I have been impressed with NGC's creation of the numerical ratings for Strike and Surface as distinct from wear grade. Acquiring a few NGC-graded coins changed the way I think about a coin's condition. Although I still struggle to understand all the nuances of 'Surface' I find NGC does a good job grading ancient coins.

It is unfortunate the industry hasn't come up with a reclosable slab yet, but NGC's photo certificate has a lot of potential until such a slab is invented.

Kushano-Sasanian coins are kind of interesting

Last week I posted on import restrictions on Roman coins. That post got 13 replies -- a much higher volume than my usual posts. Looking over my earlier posts, I see 16 posts that received zero comments and then one on import restrictions on Egyptian coins that somehow got 12 replies. It seems my readership is mostly interested in Customs issues.

When I started this blog I had hoped to write about computers and ancient coins, but those posts seem to attract little interest. In the past I have asked readers what they want to see here, but have gotten merely generic encouragement.

Wayne Sayles recently blogged about collecting coins that others ignore. I think Wayne is on to something so I will write about that. Lately I have been interested in pre-Islamic coins and have applied to join the Oriental Numismatic Society.

My latest coin is a Kushano-Sasanian bronze of Peroz I from Balkh circa 245-270 AD. The obverse is said to read ΠIPΩZO OOZOPKO KOÞANO ÞOYO (Peroz the great, Kushan king) and depicts king Peroz standing facing, head left, sacrificing over altar and holding a trident in his left hand.

The reverse is said to read OOPZAOANΔO IAZAΔO (Exhalted God) but I don't know how they get that — I can't make out a single letter on any of the examples I've seen! It depicts the Exhalted God (Siva?) standing facing, holding diadem and trident, before the bull Nandi. The bull has very odd feet on this coin and several other specimens that I have seen.

For those interested in provenance and import issues this coin comes from the collection of Robert N. Cook, Jr. of Graham, North Carolina. The collection was largely assembled 50 years ago in Indian and Afghanistan. Unfortunately I have no documentation for this particular coin before a February 2015 auction.

Wayne's post advises you to collect what others are not interested in. This particular coin sold, unattributed, in a lot of 24 Kushan coins that went for $2 each at auction. They buyer flipped it on eBay for 10x that, misattributed as the Kushan ruler Vasudeva. It is likely that these coins will be more appreciated in a few years after dealers start using the new reference, Kushan, Kushano-Sasanian, and Kidarite Coins: A Catalogue of Coins from the American Numismatic Society, by David Jongeward and Joe Cribb with Peter Donovan. I have not seen that work yet but eagerly anticipate publication.

False patinas

In Classical Deception (page 54) Wayne Sayles mentions the excellent patinas on Sicilian fake coins starting in the 1990s. After his book was published I noticed copies of the coin Sayles used as an example appearing in the printed catalogs of several dealers.

I was wondering recently if hand-held XRF guns could be used to identify real and false patinas and a web search lead me to a five-year-old post on FORVM by Lloyd Taylor referencing a 2009 paper in Mediterranean Archaeology and Archaeometry. The paper is “Ancient Coins and their Modern Fakes: an Attempt of Physico-Chemical Unmasking” by A. M. Mezzasalma, G. Mondio, T. Serafino, G. De Fulvio, M. Romeo, and A. Salici.

They analyze five fake bronze coins. This is the recipe the forger confessed to:

“…one of the most used recipes for fakes artificial ageing utilizes a solution composed by penthydrated CuSO₄ [Copper Sulfate] together with HNO₃ [Nitric Acid] and NH₄Cl [Ammonium Chloride] in distilled H₂O [Water]. In this solution, warmed up until 80‐90°C, the just produced fakes (at about 100 °C) are immersed. Such a bath gives them an artificial patina with an “antique green” colour and a deceptive antiquity appearance. Drops of the above CuSO₄ solution on clean bronze surfaces may form dendritic structures with the same characteristics of those observed in our fakes.”

Note: the fake BR02, which the authors couldn't identify, is a Himera gorgoneion / pellets.

American collectors should comment on the pending renewal of the MOU with Italy

Under Italian law, all antiquities must be registered with the government. Newly found antiquities belong to the government. So if Italians are digging a well and find some old coins, they must surrender them to the police.

Under US law, countries that have a serious problem with looting / grave-robbing / metal-detecting are allowed to ask for a "Memorandum of Understanding" which lists the kind of artifacts being looted. Currently the US and Italy have one and it covers, among other things, coins of Greek Sicily. So Americans can't just bid in British and German auctions for such coins, because without paperwork showing the coins have been on the collector market for years it is against the law to bring them to the US.

The Italians are asking for an extension. The extensions last for five years. The extension doesn't have to cover the same stuff. It could cover fewer coin types or more coin types. If it covered all Roman Imperial coins it would be frustrating, because these coins would be selling openly in many EU countries, but Americans wouldn't be able to buy them.

Some folks would like to see all ancient artifact sales banned. Others feel the sale of common objects like coins and rings is not a big deal. The purpose of filing comments is so that the US representatives don't just rubber-stamp whatever the Italian representatives ask for.

American collectors should read It's Not Too Late on Cultural Property Observer's blog and leave comments for the US Government's Advisory Committee.

You Thought It Was More

Louis Colavecchio with Franz Douskey and Andy Thibault 426 pages. $24.99, $9.99 on Kindle

Louis Colavecchio's book cover describes him as the "World's Greatest Counterfeiter". That seems to be a standard claim for the genre. Who would want to read a book about the 2nd or 3rd greatest counterfeiter?

Colavecchio counterfeited casino chips, not coins or paper money. He seems to have counterfeited a great deal of chips, enough that casinos have stopped using them.

When I read about counterfeiters I want to see a picture of their fake next to an original. As is typical in these accounts, Colavecchio's lacks coin photography or pictures and drawings of any kind. The cover collage depicts seven casino chips, two steel dies for $100 chips, Colavecchio himself, a slot machine, and a pile of gold-colored coins that look like 1 euro pieces. This is disappointing. Colavecchio claims drafting skills and kept a contraband ruler concealed for years while in prison. I would have liked some technical drawings included in the book.

Chapter 1 is about making and selling counterfeit sweaters in the early 1960s. Chapter 2 is making statuettes using lost wax casting. Chapters 4-6 are about managing jewelry stores. Chapter 8 is about making phone phreaker red boxes and telephone slugs. (The slugs were made around 1980.) 10 and 11 are about importing and modifying sports cars. 13 covers jewelry manufacturing. Chapters 14-17 discuss casino chip counterfeiting (70 pages). Chapters 18-21 discuss jail, court, and prison. The other chapters are about who got whacked in Rhode Island in the 1960s and 70s, and why. Actually all the chapters are about crime and women.

Colavecchio's telephone slugs are only mentioned briefly.

The casino chip dies were made using Electrical Discharge Machining, the process called "spark-erosion counterfeiting" in the numismatic trade. (See Max Spiegel's article on NGC to see an example of a collector coin created with spark eroded dies). A 320 ton Mario Di Maio press was used to strike the chips.

Colavecchio forged both metal and plastic chips. A lot of the counterfeiting discussion in the book concerns getting the correct weight and color out of plastic materials. These discussions may not appear important to the coin collector, but recall that the country or rebel province Transnistria recently started issuing circulating plastic coins.

Colavecchio's writing, or perhaps the writing of his two co-authors, is good. I found all the mob and crime stuff presented in an entertaining way. (The typesetting is poor and there are lots of bogus commas and line spacing issues, but that doesn't reflect on the writing.) The book is well worth reading if you like true crime or counterfeiting. Although Colavecchio brags about having secrets the US Mint needed to consult him on, most of the tips, and that he made amazing improvements to his EDM machine, this book does not go into more detail than other books on coin forgery. This is an entertaining story about criminals, not a technical manual.

Smithsonian now able to digitize 400 numismatic objects per hour

An article by Max Kutner in Smithsonian Magazine discusses efforts to digitize 250,000 bank notes, tax stamps, and war bonds from the National Numismatic Collection.

Twenty people are able to digitize 3500 items per day, suggesting the whole project will take 72 business days. They use a conveyor belt and 80 megapixel imaging system. The team previously had success digitizing 45,000 bumblebees in 40 days.

The cost per object is less than a dollar.

Fictional bridges on Euro banknotes constructed in the Netherlands

“'The European Bank didn't want to use real bridges so I thought it would be funny to claim the bridges and make them real,' [Dutch designer Robin Stam] told Dezeen.”

(via Marginal Revolution)

3D coin scans using focus stacking

On CoinCommunity.com, DVCollector shows a 3D scan of an Athenian tetradrachm. He took 56 pictures of the coin, each with a different focus, and used Helicon software to produce an image in extreme focus as well as 3D animation. Impressive!

Counterfeit 25 peso coin lab in the Dominican Republic

According to Dominican Today (no byline),

... Police ... dismantled an underground laboratory being used for forging 25 peso coins, following a raid on a house in the Sabana Perdida neighborhood of Santo Domingo North.

...

According to the police report, three machines used for manufacturing false 25 peso coins were seized during the operation, along with two engines, a drying oven and dozens of coins ready for processing.

...

In recent weeks traders and motorbike taxi divers in the area of La Caleta, Boca Chica have complained of being cheated by customers paying them for products and services with fake 25 peso coins.

The coins have a face value equivalent to 57 cents. Web site commentators suggest the counterfeiting story is unlikely. I disagree, given the large numbers of counterfeit UK pounds.

Unusual coin denomination: the spesmilo

I had been previously unfamiliar with the Spesmilo symbol. It apparently was only used on a single 'coin', a 1912 fantasy issue of the Esperanto congress. (The NGC web site lists examples in MS60 and XF40). According to Wikipedia the coin was used before the first world war by a few British and Swiss banks

Unicode has assigned the symbol U+20B7 SPESMILO SIGN.

The denomination was planned to equal 0.8g of 22k gold, or about 1/2 a US dollar, 2 shillings in Britain, or one Russian Ruble. It was supposed to be worth 1000 spesmiloj. The denomination is obsolete: Esperanto fantasies struck after 1945 are based on the imaginary Stelo system, not the Spesmilo.

On the Mac if I try to enter the Spesmilo sign I do NOT see the expected Sm abbreviation. Instead I see a P with a line through it. I have pasted it here: ₷. I have no idea what you will see. It is supposed to look like this:

The P with a line through it is the new currency symbol for the Russian Ruble. Microsoft has apparently rolled out support for the new Symbol in Windows. The Mac, at least mine running 10.8.5, has placed that glyph at the code point for the Spesmilo sign ... a denomination equal to one ruble.

Counterfeit US currency by MrMouse sold online

According to a blog post by Brian Krebs, a counterfeiter (or middleman) who goes by the alias MrMouse is selling high quality US notes at 45% of face value, payable in BitCoin.

MrMouse says his single-ply bills do not have magnetic ink, and so they won’t pass machines designed to look for the presence of this feature. However, this fraudster claims his $100 bill includes most of the other security features that store clerks and cashiers will look for to detect funny money, including the watermark, the pen test, and the security strip.

In addition, MrMouse says his notes include “microprinting,” tiny lettering that can only be seen under magnification (“USA 100″ is repeated within the number 100 in the lower left corner, and “The United States of America” appears as a line in the left lapel of Franklin’s coat). The sourdough vendor also claims his hundreds sport “color-shifting ink,” ...

I had no trouble finding the actual ads using search keywords mrmouse counterfeit.

K Foundation Burn A Million Quid

Early in the morning of 23 August 1994, in an abandoned boathouse on the Scottish island of Jura, Bill Drummond and Jimmy Cauty burned £1,000,000 pounds. It was the majority of the fortune they had earned in their brief career as pop stars (their band was The KLF).

This Saturday will be the 20th anniversary.

You can watch the burning on YouTube. There is also a television interview. A book on the burning, K Foundation Burn a Million Quid (1997) is available on Amazon for $10. AbeBooks has a copy of the book for £0.60.

Do the coins of Antiochos IV depict the Medusa Rondanini?

The Seleukid emperor Antiochos IV, who ruled from 175 BC until his death in 164 BC, gave the Athenians a golden aegis with the Gorgon upon it. Presumably Pausanias, who lived in the 2nd century AD, actually saw the aegis at the theater in Athens.

What did the golden aegis look like? Antiochos IV actually had some of his bronze and small silver coins minted in Antioch depicting an aegis, perhaps the very aegis that Pausanias would see three centuries later.

CNG, e-auction 124, lot 92

The most famous Medusa from ancient times is the Medusa Rondanini. The marble Rondanini sculpture is an important piece of Cultural Property in Italy, and has been depicted occasionally on their currency such as the 1948 1000 lire note.

Janer Danforth Belson has suggested the Medusa Rondanini is a copy of the aegis Antiochos IV gave the Athenians. Belson believes “Classicizing features for the gorgoneion would have been chosen intentionally as an artistic tribute to the sculptural stype of Pheidias and his chryselephantine creation.” Belforth says “… the gorgoneion shown on this coin has many of the same iconographic features of the Medusa Rondanini rather than the usual round faces of the ‘grotesque’ type.”

If Antiochos IV's coins depict the Rondinini (or it's original) as Edward Newell first suggested in 1918, then Antiochos IV's aegis coin reverse provides an important contemporary reference confirming Belson's theory. Does the coin match? (Scroll back and compare them). I would say not much. It is possible the Rondinini only copies the center gorgoneion of the Athenian's aegis. Unfortunately the bronze coins are not detailed enough to make a positive identification. Antiochos also issued small silver coins depicting an aegis, but they are so small the gorgoneion is only a few millimeters across.

An even rarer coin type of Antiochos IV's depicts a side-facing winged head usually described as Medusa. I wondered if it could possibly depict the same sculpture.

First I had to find a side-view of the Medusa Rondinini. I had a hard time! Nothing on the regular internet shows the Rondinini from the side. I finally found the side view in Adolf Furtwängler's 1895 book Masterpieces of Greek Sculpture. I have placed it beside an image of the coin from the 2009 catalog by Münzen & Medaillen of the Roland Müller collection. The coin is rotated and scaled to match Furtwängler's picture.

I believe there is quite a resemblance!

Arthur Houghton and Catherine Lorber suggest the side-facing Medusa coins were struck at Antiochos IV's mint in Mallos. They connect Medusa iconography with later tetradrachms of Mallos that depict Athena with an aegis draped over her shoulders and back. This is possible, but I prefer connecting Medusa iconography with the forward facing aegis struck at the Antioch mint.

And with the Medusa Rondinini.

Dave Surber (of Wildwinds) collection being auctioned Tuesday

Many of you use Wildwinds.com, a web site cataloging ancient coins built in 2000 by Dave Surber.

Dave Surber passed away suddenly five years ago. His collection is being auctioned on Tuesday by Agora Auctions. 46 Greek coins, 61 Roman Provincial, 133 Roman Imperial, 21 Byzantine and Medieval. 26 lots of books. 35 group lots.

Collectors' source for Zero Rupee Notes

Collectors may obtain Fifth Pillar's anti-corruption Zero Rupee Notes from Joel's Coins. As of this writing Joel's price is $2/note (but cheaper in quantity.)

The 50 Rupee note that the anti-corruption piece mimics has an exchange value of 83 US cents. Thus in single quantities and encased in plastic the anti-corruption note is worth more than what it mimics, at least to collectors.

Of course, you can always download and print your own notes. Because of this it will be difficult for collectors to distinguish the notes distributed by Fifth Pillar from ink-jet printed notes.

Although Fifth Pillar printed more than a million of these notes and has been distributing them for six years they have been scarcer than hen's teeth on the collectors' market. Fifth Pillar's concept of using imitation bills to discourage corruption has been widely reported. Stories appeared in The Economist (and here), CNN, the World Bank's blog, and NumisMaster. Fifth Pillar also made a video.

This note will be historically important. Collectors of paper money should consider obtaining an example.

Quarter deliveries, for laundry

The web site washboard.co is offering “Quarters for laundry, delivered monthly”. Prices as low as $14.99 for $10 in quarters a month, with two day shipping.

A parody? Every laundromat I've used had a change machine. But I suspect the site is real.

Unicode 7 adds symbol for Azeri Manat symbol

We can now typeset the Azerbaijani currency symbol, the Azeri Manat, as it has been added to Unicode 7.0.

Code.az reported that the symbol gained wide use in 2012, appearing on advertisements and markets in Azerbaijan. The code is U+20BC. If your browser, OS, and font support it you will see the symbol here: ₼

(On my browser (FireFox, Mac OS X 10.8) I see the new Ruble character, and not the M-like manat symbol.)

Older websites, such as Currency Symbols, describe the currency using the Cyrillic abreviation ман. The full list of Unicode currency symbols can be obtained from unicode.org.

Hungarian central bank shreds old notes for heating

Hungarian central bank shreds old notes for heating (2012)

A Greek die deteriorates

For many years I suspected the animated coins above were modern forgeries. The first die in the animation looks very strange. There are dots within the snakes surrounding Medusa, a very unusual feature. The first die shows blunders, such as two dots on the tongue. The snakes near the cheek have poorly made circles.

The reverse die has some unusual features. It appears octagonal rather than the typical round or square. The shackle above the anchor seems to float above it. There are weird scratches on it.

For years I gathered images from this coin and die-linked coins, hoping to prove it was fake. I was even working on an essay explaining my reasoning. Some of the die-linked coins have strange die re-engravings and post-strike damage.

I now think it is genuine. Stay tuned.

Checking die matches with Gimp

Recently I tried to compare the dies between an XF specimen and a damaged one. I mistakenly thought both dies matched, but actually only the obverses seem to match.

Let me explain how I use Gimp software to compare dies in the difficult cases.

First we need two coin images that are exactly the same size and rotation.

I use Gimp on the Mac. After opening the image I use the Measure Tool to check the number of pixels and the angle between two things. For example I will use the tips of the anchor.

If the angles I wrong I use the Rotate Tool to get the coin into a close orientation. Instead of eyeballing it I type in the difference in angles into the Rotate Tool's dialog box.

Then I use Image->Scale Image… to get the two images exactly equal in size. I haven't found an easy way to do this with Gimp; I use Gimp's percentage scaling and cross-multiplication. For example if one image has 330 pixels between two points, and other has 300 pixels I will do 330*100/300 to get the percentage.

Then I use Image->Canvas Size to increase one image. Next I select the other image, and Copy, and select the image with the large canvas, and Edit->Paste as New Layer. The New Layer part is very important. I get an image like this:

Then I go to the Layer, Channels, Paths, Undo window, and change the Mode from Normal to one of the merging ones, like "Grain merge."

If you aren't in the Rectangle Tool at this point enter it by clicking R on the keyboard. Then using the arrow keys walk the layer around until it is positioned precisely.

Then Save As. Choose a filename ending in .gif. Tell it to save the layers as animation with 1000ms between transitions.
Oops. Not a match. I had looked at undamaged places which were very close.
A match. Note especially all the snakes line up.

Hopefully you can see the obverses match and the reverses don't.

It is somewhat tricky with the obverses, because of the damage and the camera angle.

Photoshop software also has this ability, although I don't know the precise commands to work with layers in Photoshop.

Let's not forget to comment on the ancient Egyptian coins for the proposed MOU

Last week Peter Tompa suggested we should comment on a proposed emergency restrictions on the import of ancient Egyptian coins being considered by the US State Department.

I don't have much to say about Egyptian coins. I have three in my collection. I don't see a sudden surge of them in dealer inventories; but I haven't really looked.

These US-only MOUs are annoying. An example of my frustration: the picture below shows two ancient coins struck for the Greek city-state of Apollonia Pontika circa 400 BC. Around 630 AD the area was conquered by Bulgarians. The US signed a Memorandum creating import restrictions on material of Bulgarian origin in January, 2014.

What's unusual about the coins below is that the first is broken and has bits flaking off. It was sold openly on eBay Germany by a well-known long-time ancient coin dealer as a 'fourree', or silver-plated ancient counterfeit, in 2012. Yet the second coin seems to be struck properly in solid silver. It was also offered openly in an online German auction, but in March 2014, and without the paperwork to get the coin into the United States. So I declined to bid.

It certainly would have been interesting to bring those two coins together. It shouldn't be possible for the same dies to create both a fourree and a silver coin… Perhaps the first is not a fourree, but merely crystallized? Luckily I own the former, and now I'm incredibly curious to figure out what it really is. Yet what I really want is to have a chance to rejoin it with it's brother; a chance I almost had, but missed. The US stopped letting collectors import coins from Apollonia Pontika two months before this coin was offered. I will continue looking for an example with more documentation, but it can be difficult to find matches at all, let alone well-documented ones.

Egyptian coins from the Greek, Roman, and early Islamic periods are collected in the United States, yet also in Europe and in Arabia. If the US were joining a coin export ban popularly supported in Egypt and being implemented in other collecting countries it would be reasonable to support implementing it here. Having the US Customs go it alone without multinational support seems likely to have no effect on world collector markets nor on Egyptian archeology.

Read Peter's piece and if you agree follow his instructions.

UPDATE: added image in response to comment 1

WESPNEX coin show in Westchester County, NY

Last week there was a coin show in Westchester County, NY. The Westchester Stamp Coin and Paper Money show.

Over 30 coin dealers attend. US coins, foreign coins, even ancient coins. It's in White Plains, not far from the Metro-North train station. Easy access from the NYC area. They hold it three or four times a year.

There is nothing about this show on the Internet. No web site, no Facebook page, no listing on coinshows.com.

It's not a bad show, if you can find it.

Digital Historia Numorum currently offline; need advice

I took my digital copy of Barclay Head's Historia Numorum offline.

I started getting email from my provider that my web site was using large amounts of transfer. I looked at my server's logs, and found hundreds of requests for a valid URL, followed by / and some other part of the web site, like this:

/coins/hn/peloponnesus.html/nc/bmc/nc/library/nc/library/bmc/peloponnesus/
/coins/hn/peloponnesus.html/nc/nc/nc/nc/nc/nc/bmc/peloponnesus/
/coins/hn/peloponnesus.html/bmc/nc/nc/nc/nc/nc/nc/bmc/peloponnesus/
/coins/hn/peloponnesus.html/nc/library/nc/bmc/library/bmc/peloponnesus/
/coins/hn/peloponnesus.html/bmc/nc/nc/nc/nc/nc/library/bmc/peloponnesus/
/coins/hn/peloponnesus.html/library/library/nc/nc/bmc/bmc/peloponnesus/
… 1000s more …
/coins/hn/peloponnesus.html/library/nc/nc/nc/nc/bmc/bmc/peloponnesus/
/coins/hn/peloponnesus.html/library/nc/nc/nc/bmc/nc/bmc/peloponnesus/

I suspect that what is happening is some Bot is downloading a page, seeing my relative URLs to elsewhere on the site (e.g. ../bmc/index.html"), but then throwing away the .. and miscalculating the link as /bmc/index.html. But on my site, anything after a valid filename.html returns the same filename. The Bot thinks it is spidering a giant site but as actually getting the same page over and over.

Anyone know how to get Apache to 404 requests for / ? I have been running this site for ten years. If I can't get it working I will move the whole site to Amazon S3, but I'd rather not take that step this month.

Patents related to ISIS coin authentication

A few weeks ago we linked to information on the Royal Mint's ISIS technology.

A recent thread on StackExchange.com links to a patent on Metallic materials with embedded luminescent particles. The abstract:

Formation of an authentication element by deposition of a metal layer with embedded particles on a metal substrate, wherein the embedded particles are configured to convert energy from one wavelength to another. The embedded particles may be upconverters, downconverters, or phosphorescent phosphors, which can be detected and measured with analytical equipment when deposited in the metal layer. A metal substrate may include coinage.

Adam Davis writes

Essentially they are embedding inorganic fluorescent compounds into the metal plating on the coin. When a certain spectrum of light is shone on the coin, these particles absorb that energy and emit a different spectrum. So, depending on the particle they embed, the detector may be as simple as a UV LED and a light sensor at a specific wavelength.

By integrating different ratios of different particles they can differentiate between different coins, for instance.

Further, the patent explains that the plating process generally includes many layers of plating. They can add different mixes at each layer, and thus tell how well-used a coin is, by how many of the upper layers are removed. Aging the coin can be useful to determine when to take it out of circulation before these particles are entirely removed.

This technology can also be used in automotive parts, and technology equipment to defeat counterfeiting. For instance if you replace your iPhone screen with a counterfeit part, unless the counterfeiter goes to the trouble of matching the exact luminescent profile, Apple may be able to detect that you broke your phone's warranty, should Apple choose to use such technology to protect themselves from counterfeit products.

The technology doesn't include any sort of serial number or tracking component, so tracking coins through the system is unlikely, but perhaps other techniques they apply to the coins could be used for that purpose.

Although Mr. Davis doesn't think the coins could be tracked, imagining only measuring the ratios of different particles, it seems possible to scan the entire coin and compare it using a Scale Invarient Feature Transform. An encoding of the particles might be much larger than a serial number, but should easily fit in today's computers.

“This was like a moonshot for us”

Kyle VanHemert describes the US Mint's baseball commemorative for Wired Online.

“This was like a moonshot for us,” says Stephen C. Antonucci, manager of digital development for the U.S. Mint in Philadelphia. “It stretched the bounds of everything we knew about coin development.”

Yes, there will be a half dollar. It will be clad.

Cisco AnyConnect was overwhelming my Mac

Recently my Mac's battery life fell to about an hour. I repaired the problem, but didn't see it reported on the web, so I will post it here so Google can find it.

The Activity Monitor app showed acwebsecagent and ReportCrash using about 15% of the CPU. The Console app showed the messages

3/8/14 10:36:22.543 AM acwebsecagent[1049]: Config : The service only loads an obfuscated configuration file
3/8/14 10:36:22.543 AM acwebsecagent[1049]: ERROR : Failed to load Configuration file
3/8/14 10:36:23.516 AM acvpnagent[75]: 'acwebsecagent' service process , pid 1049, terminated
3/8/14 10:36:25.579 AM ReportCrash[1024]: Saved crash report for acwebsecagent[1052] version ??? to /Library/Logs/DiagnosticReports/acwebsecagent_2014-03-08-103625_....crash

The problem seemed to come from Cisco AnyConnect.

The fix was

sudo /opt/cisco/anyconnect/bin/websecurity_uninstall.sh

I don't know why it worked!

iSIS aRMour

The Royal Mint (UK) has designed a new coin process said to make make forgery impossible.

2 minute video.

The technology, called iSIS, is apparently a special material that can be added to the aRMour technology that electroplates a 25 micron coating on coin blanks. No details on what the material is. A PDF nomination to the International Association of Currency Affairs I found online explained that there will be low speed 'simple iSIS' detectors at point-of-sale (in shops) as well as 'advanced iSIS' high speed detectors in banks.

The Royal Mint's iSIS page.

Seminar in Central Asian and Middle Eastern Numismatics this weekend

Readers might be interested in the Sixth Annual Seminar in Central Asian and Middle Eastern Numismatics at Hofstra University in Hempstead, NY this weekend. Hempstead is on Long Island, about 25 miles East of Manhattan. There is a train to Hempstead, but it takes a long time, and I have never taken it. The drive isn't bad.

I went last year and it was great. Very advanced. If you have a chance, go.

Indian government officials seize hoard of 104 'pottu kasu'

Writing for The Times of India, Bosco Dominique tells us that Indian government officials seized a hoard of gold (?) 'pottu kasu' weighing roughly five sovereigns.

I am uncertain what pottu kasu is. Google translates it as 'spud benefits'. A Reddit commentator transliterates it as pattu kasu or padi kasulu and translates it as 'ten cents'. A sovereign weights 8g and these coins were 1/20 that so perhaps the coins are gold fanams.

The coins were discovered by accident by workers digging a septic tank. The report focuses not on the coins, but on how the finders attempted to divide and keep the coins.

Periyannan took the metal box and broke it in the presence of the farmer. To their surprise, they found small gold-like coins. They believed that someone might have buried the metal box with coins after performing rituals to ward off evil spirits. The farmer transferred the coins to a plastic container and kept it in his house. ...

The worker along with Kabilan and another person reached Murugan's house and demanded their share. Murugan came forward to hand over the entire treasure to them but the worker and others took only 43 coins ...

Meanwhile, Ramasamy's wife Anjalai reached Periyannan's house and created a ruckus when she learned that he had got a share of the coins while her husband had not. The news soon spread in the village and the villagers informed the police.

$409,200,000 of Bitcoins stolen, Mt. Gox shuts down, one million people lose account balances

Cameron Keng writes for Forbes that the Mt. Gox web site has been hacked and shut down.

744,000 BitCoins, until recently worth over $400 million USD, were hacked. As far as I can tell there is no way to get the coins back. One million folks kept accounts, called 'wallets', on the site.

Bitcoins are trading now for US $490 (as of 9:15am), down from over $600 yesterday.

Who stole it? Well, there is a Bitcoin address that recently had BTC782,000 move through it. That address is now empty, but scroll down and see large BTC payments going all over.

150 coins siezed at Romanian coin show

Does anyone speak Romanian? I found an article (no byline?) suggesting

Police confiscated [at] a numismatic and philatelic market in Brasov 154 old coins, some dating from the second and first centuries BC, and others [from] the medieval period that would come from archaeological sites which were sold illegally at fair prices between 5 and 20 lei.

(Google translation to English)

5 lei is $1.50, I believe, and 20 lei is $6.

Dealing with the small change shortage in modern Palestine

Writing for y-net-news.com, Elior Levy reports on improvised replacements for the vanished half-shekel coins in occupied Gaza. Bus and taxi drivers either give change in candy, or round-up when traveling in one direction and round-down when traveling in the other. Although small change is still being minted,

Gazans have been running low on Israeli coin currency for a while, partly due to an Israeli-imposed ban on copper imports. The creative solution engineered by Gazans was to melt down change to create copper wire.

Mithradates’ Amazon coin type

(CNG, auction 61, 2002, lot 245)

Pictured above is a very scarce bronze coin struck by Mithradates the Great. It is usually described as depicting an Amazon wearing a wolf's scalp. We know that Mithradates' die cutters liked to engrave the face of Mithradates into his coins. There are Alexander-style tetradrachms depicting Herakles with the features of Mithradates. There are also bronzes which seem to show Perseus with the features of Mithradates.

Is it possible that the "Amazon" coins depict not a generic Amazon, but the one most important to Mithradates, his wife Hypsicratea? It would be wonderful to have a coin with the features of this legendary Amazon queen.

Many of Mithradates’ types seem to illustrate the myth of Perseus. There are tetradrachms with Pegasos reverse, large bronzes of Athena head/Perseus, large Perseus/Pegasos bronzes, this aegis/Nike bronze, and a small bronze Perseus/harpa. Barclay Head explained in 1911 the significance of the types: “On these coins the supposed Persian descent of Mithradates is emphasized by the types relating to Perseus.” Mithradates’ other bronze types include Zeus (who fathered Perseus) and Dionysos (who fought Perseus).

Warwick Wroth speculated in 1889 that the female head in ‘wolf’s skin’ type issued by Mithradates represents Andromeda. Wroth suggested that the ‘wolf’s skin’, which Mionnet called goat’s skin and James Millingen called griffin’s skin, is the skin of the ketos slain by Perseus. Mithradates’ other types are identified as “Ares” (?), “Head in leather cap”, and “Artemis”. These mythological figures are all identified by style; there is no certainty that Ares and Artemis are the correct identification. Those coins could depict other characters from Perseus’ cycle and we would not know.

Unusual Amisos coin

This coin, with the inscription AMISOS in Greek, recently sold on eBay Germany for about 100 euros.

I don't think I've seen this type before. I didn't bid on it, as it isn't in my collecting area, but my mind keeps drifting back to it. The reverse seems to depict a bird, but it is not the usual eagle pose or the rare owl used by Mithradates VI.

The same seller also offered some of the typical Mithridates types of Amisos, but also the seldom seen Amazon/Nike and the almost never seen Artemis?/Owl types.

Any thoughts on who is pictured on the mystery coin? 24mm, 6.5g.

739 fake coins found in Cairo

Reporting for Ahram Oline, Nevine El-Aref writes “The 739 supposedly Mameluke-era coins discovered in a Cairo apartment have been deemed unauthentic by an archeological committee from the Museum of Islamic Art.”

It is uncertain if the photo in Ahram Online depicts the coins themselves or is a stock photo. Perhaps a stock photo, because the Museum Director General says the coins depict Italian and European dukes of the Mamluk era (1250-1517 AD).

“A Libyan citizen accidentally found the coins hidden in a wall while carrying out routine maintenance on his Nasr City apartment.... [Mostafa] Khaled from the MIA asserted that the coins would be melt[ed] down so that they can't be used as fakes in the antiquities trading market.”

Bitcoins

Alfredo De La Fé is reporting that well-known Chicago coin dealer Harlan Berk is accepting Bitcoins as payment for coin auctions. According to the Berk website:

For Bitcoin Payments: Please make your order from our web site using the wire as payment option. After orders are received we will send out a request for Bitcoins through Coinbase.

I have decided I need some BTC and have created a wallet on Coinbase. Please click this button to donate 1/1000 of a BitCoin to me. Donate Bitcoins

(Currently 0.001 BTC is worth about 90 cents).

Image enhancement papers

Mark Mudge, Jean-Pierre Voutaz, Carla Schroer, and Marlin Lum: Reflection Transformation Imaging and Virtual Representations of Coins from the Hospice of the Grand St. Bernard (2005)

Eleni Kotoula and Maria Kyranoudi Study of Ancient Greek and Roman coins using Reflectance Transformation Imaging (2013)

Agora Auctions

I want to call everyone's attention to a new auction site, Agora Auctions. They are already up to sale #4. I purchased a coin from sale #3 and it looks exactly like the picture. I have met the owners and they are good guys. The current auction closes on Tuesday.

Auction #4 has the usual good-quality Greek and Roman stuff but there is also some of the lesser-known stuff worth looking at. They have Parthian (including Bronze), Sasanian, and Kushan coins. I was surprised to see a Baktrian fourree. There is a nice run of medieval Islamic stuff.

For folks interested in replicas there are some Peter Rosa replicas of Greek coins in the British Museum including beautiful coins of Syracuse such as this tetradrachm, from Wayne Sayles' collection and illustrated in Classical Deception.

Don't skip the Group Lots! The auction isn't just dealer lots. The Roman Provincial brockage lot seems nice.

Cleaning

Museums clean ancient coins before putting them on display. Dealers and collectors often clean coins and many have their own favorite 'recipes' for cleaning.

A much bigger problem is the cleaning of paper money. The researchers Nabil Lawandy and Andrei Smuk claim that 150,000 tons worth of paper money, unfit for recirculation, are removed from circulation every year at a cost of $10,000,000,000. The researchers have developed a method using supercritical CO₂ at 60°C and 5000 psi said to effectively clean both paper and polymer banknotes.

The researcher's paper is entitled Supercritical Fluid Cleaning of Banknotes.

(Hat tip: Marginal Revolution).

I don't collect paper money. Do collectors typically clean it? I have seen a YouTube video (from Suriname the former Dutch Guiana!) showing obsolete banknotes being cleaned in a bucket. Three minutes in the presenter admits he's never done it before!

Fake $100 bill signed 'Moe Money'

Martha Waggoner, writing for the Raleigh News Observer, reports that a 19 year old college student was arrested after passing a counterfeit $100 bill. “The signature on the bottom corner of the bill read "Moe Money" instead of the name of the secretary of the treasury. Underneath the signature, the bill read 'Proprietor of the Counterfeiting.'” Police seized a deskjet printer and ink cartridge.

Imitative 'wolf and twins'

Usually I don't collect Roman coins but something really attracted me to this tiny AE 8mm when I saw it at the New York International show.

The seller described it as a "barbarous imitation" of Helena / Wolf and Twins.  (The portrait could also be Fausta.) I don't think there ever was an official Roman coin with that combination.  There weren't any Roman coins quite this small.

I have never looked into late Roman imitations before. I would have expected there to be a catalog of them, either the inventory of a museum or an illustrated auction catalog with thousands of these. Does no one collect them? I would be curious to know if there are other coins like this.  I looked online and found some imitative wolf and twins on Warren Esty's site but nothing else.

I can see why it would be hard to understand the issuing tribes, given that the coins have no labels.  With unlabeled Greek coins the approach is by findspot.  For example, I have read that in Turkey the museums are entitled to everything found in their region. These museums never buy or sell.  Scholars guess the mints based on the number of samples in museum inventories. Is anyone doing statistics like that for Roman imitations?

Same Die Used for Silver and Electrum

Classical Numismatic Group recently auctioned a mysterious silver drachm as lot 114 in their recent auction at the New York International. The catalog notes the drachm is struck from the same die as Rosen 311, which is made of electrum, and Dewing 1008 (silver).

Perhaps one day sufficient specimens will exist to do a die study. I wonder if the electrum coins were struck earlier, later, or at the same time as the silver coins.

Unfortunately I didn't have a chance to inspect the coin myself. The auction photo is clear. The style of the reverse on the electrum specimen in Nancy Waggoner's catalog of the Rosen collection shows a square with a rough pattern. That reverse looks nothing like the four-part reverse on the silver specimens.

It would be unfortunate if the Rosen coin is false, as I believe an electrum gorgon/incuse to be.

I had a great time last week at the New York International. I was glad to see familiar faces. Hope everyone is having a good 2014. Feel free to reply in the comments section on this coin or any other topic related to the show or the new year.

The earliest Greek coin depicting a gorgon?

Perhaps the earliest Greek coin type depicting a gorgon was a series of rare electrum staters. We don’t know when they were struck but the style of their reverse punches suggests they were probably created before Athens struck the silver Wappenmünzen series around 520 BC. Ingrid Krauskopf and Stefan-Christian Dahlinger date this coinage to 650-600 in their LIMC entry on gorgon iconography.

These early electrum gorgons are very rare. I have only been able to find mention of two staters and four or five of the 1/3 stater pieces. Liselotte Weidauer pointed out in 1975 that both the 1/3 staters (which depict a single gorgon) and the double gorgon staters come from the same obverse die. When striking the 1/3 staters, the blank was somehow held over one half of the die.

I wish I could inspect a cast of the stater. From the published photographs it is hard to understand the border design on the double gorgon. I also struggle to see how the the 1/3 staters could receive two punches of the reverse without slipping out of the much larger obverse die. I also can’t figure out what order the reverse punches were done on the stater. It looks like the long vertical punch was applied last, which is the opposite of what I had expected, but I just can’t tell from the pictures.

Weidauer and John Kroll believe the reverse punches resemble the “I am the badge of Phanes” electrum coins depicting a deer, and they suggest Ephesos as the most likely mint. The British Museum’s 1/3 stater was apparently found on Rhodes and George Hill suggested an origin in Southern Ionia. The double gorgoneion design is very unusual. I don’t know of any other Greek examples but a similar double depiction of the Egyptian god Bes can be seen on a Philistian drachm.

Electrum Coinage (continued)

In a presentation delivered at the ANS Electrum Coinage conference, François Velde pointed out that early electrum coins have very precise weights but their gold:silver ratio varies widely. Since the local gold was pure the minters were likely adding random amounts of silver. So why carefully control the weight? He described these coins as basically lottery tickets.

Velde's observations expose the problem. The following should be considered a speculation...

If the minters explicitly added varying amounts of silver could they have been trying to purposely make the coinage less useful than the hack gold ingots in use at the time? Could the irregular bullion value of early electrum have been a "feature" rather than a "bug"?

It is usually presented that the cementation process of separating gold and silver was an improvement over natural electrum. The story is that when that process became available, under King Croesus, he switched his coinage to the superior bi-metallic system. We aren't sure exactly when the ancients first learned to separate gold and silver, or the precise issue period of early electrum coins. I wonder if the ability to separate gold and silver counter-intuitively caused to the appearance of mixed (electrum) coinage, rather than set the stage for the end of early electrum.

David Graeber points out in his intriguing Debt: The First 5000 Years (2012) that systems of accounting based on debt long preceded coinage. He speculates that coinage was invented as a scheme to provision an army. In Graeber's view, rather than forcing citizens to provide food and materials for an army, a king merely demands a tax in coins he only issues to his army.

Electrum seems perfectly suited to a paranoid king attempting such a scheme. The equipment to separate gold and silver takes a lot of capital to build. Refineries are hard to conceal because of the smoke and smell. It would be easy to have a royal monopoly on parting gold. Mercenaries paid in electrum were less likely to desert if they knew their leader was the only person who could convert their electrum coins into more valuable hack gold.

Such a king could stamp the electrum he issued to his soldiers to ensure the populace equipped the right army. (His army.) I can imagine a lot of warlords running around ancient Lydia, each trying to obtain provisions from local farmers. Attempting a closed currency with identifiable stamped designs seems ideal.

Under such a system the precise weights serve the purpose of discouraging the unscrupulous from hacking or filing off a bit of the coin to keep for themselves. The weight standard can be seen as an anti-clipping technology rather than a promise of fixed bullion value.

Early electrum as a closed military coinage feels correct and compelling, but am I fooling myself? It would be nice to look for confirmation or something that could show the idea to be false. More precise dating could help … if we could show that gold refining was successful before early electrum coins were issued that would lend support. Or if I could find something that suggested early electrum economies were 'closed'.

Early Electrum Coinage Symposium

The American Numismatic Society recently hosted an Early Electrum Coinage Symposium. I had been unaware of the revolution that is happening in this important field. I had expected to learn about minor advances in the field, building upon what I thought I knew. Instead we learned that no one is certain if the electrum in the earliest Greek coins was found naturally or manufactured. We learned the minting techniques for early electrum are a mystery. We also developed a better understanding of our ignorance of the purpose and issue date of early coinage.

I came out of the conference much less informed than I entered. I loved it!

100 years ago early coinage was well understood. Two ancient authors, Herodotus and Xenophanes of Colophon, wrote that the ancient Lydians were the first to strike coins in gold and silver. Electrum is “a natural compound of gold and silver, collected at Sardes from the washings of the little mountain torrent Pactolus”. Everyone knew the earliest coins were struck from lumps of electrum first on a rough surface using hammers and rough punches. This process naturally lead to cutting images such as lions and deer upon anvils allowing a picture to appear on the front of the coin. These early coins were buried in the well-excavated foundation of the temple of Ephesus allowing them to be clearly dated. These primitive coins inspired a later and better system of gold and silver coinage.

The consensus view turns out to be mostly wrong. The Pactolus produces something more like gold than electrum. The anvil and punch technique couldn't have worked the way we thought. The gifts buried at the temple of Artemis weren't typical temple foundation objects. We aren't certain what happened in the refinery at Sardes. The electrum coins linked to certain wars probably need to be placed elsewhere.

The material presented at last months symposium in New York build upon the results of another conference presented last year in Jerusalem. A lot of it was multidisciplinary, drawing experts in mining and refining. I look forward to the proceedings of the Jerusalem White Gold conference.

Neutrino scientists and archeologists both want ancient Roman lead artifacts

Gerard LeBlond reports on the use of ancient lead for a new purpose.

A circulated brockage from Nepal

As a child error coins fascinated me. I had off-center cents and 5 cent pieces and a tattered copy of Alan Herbert's 1974 book The Official Guide to Mint Errors. The book had an entire chapter on brockages. I had never seen a brockage.

Brick-and-mortar coin shops didn't have brockages, at least not in Michigan. Even at a really big coin show it was rare to see one.

When I started collecting ancient coins I was surprised to discover ancient brockages are not exceedingly rare. Sixty-eight ancient examples are offered for sale right now on an ancient coin sale web site, as compared to a single modern brockage. (The site has twice as many total ancient coins as modern coins, so a better comparison would be 68:2.)

Would ancient users of coins even notice anything unusual when spending a brockage? It seems hard not to notice a brockage, yet we don't see any evidence that ancient brockages were put aside. They appear alongside regular coins in hoards.

I was surprised to find a modern, circulated brockage recently at a coin show. Even more surprising, it wasn't in a fancy holder. It was in a junk box among similar coins from the region. This coin, a Nepalese one paisa from 1947, somehow managed to circulate in Nepal during the 20th century. It then made its way to the United States and a dealer's try without anyone noticing anything unusual. This suggests that brockages do not "jump out" to the average user or even to a casual coin dealer. Perhaps it really takes a trained eye to "see" brockages?

I would be curious to know of other modern circulated brockages. Does anyone collect them?

Interesting thoughts on discouraging the ivory trade

Interesting thoughts on discouraging the ivory trade from an influential economist.

New eBay coin category

Virtual Currency is a new eBay category I haven't seen before. Not many listings yet.

Kshs

Design firm ARK has proposed a new symbol for the Kenyan Shilling.

I have been too busy with other things to post lately. Hope everyone is doing fine. In the comments section let me know what other numismatic blogs are worth reading.

Bitcoin mining machine

I haven't had much to write about for the past couple of months. I did read an article on Bitcoin mining. Highly recommended for techies. The article covers the mathematical bitcoins, not the physical Bitcoins that can be used to carry them.

3D Gadhaiya Paisa

As before, although the image looks OK without glasses you really want to use red/cyan 3D glasses to see this coin.

This enigmatic coinage was struck in India, 800-1300 AD. It's usually called “Gadhaiya Paisa”. I realize I know almost nothing about Indian coinage during this time. I have Michael Mitchiner's Indo-Greek and Indo-Scythian Coinage, covering coins up to the 4th century, but the rest of Indian coinage is a mystery to me until the British Raj period.

Is there a good book to get started with the mysterious pre-Islamic coins of India?

3d Menander

I have been taking 3D scans of a few favorite coins. The image is of a drachm of Menander. Red/cyan glasses should be worn to see the image properly.

Last month I posted a bronze coin scanned this way and got no comments. I would be curious to know if any of my readers have tried looking at these images with 3d glasses. I have a bunch more scans, but I'm not going to post them if no one has the glasses.