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)
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.
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!
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.
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?
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.
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.
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'.
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.
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?
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.
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?
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.
Frank Holt, Lost World of the Golden King: In Search of Ancient Afghanistan (2012, 343 pages)
It's good! Holt retraces the development of Baktrian numismatics from the tetradrachm of Eukratides published in 1738 by Theophilus Siegfried Bayer to the present day. Holt's narrative is not a dry scholarly recap; he includes many stories including new research about the arrival of Eukratides' giant ancient coin on the European market.
This is a good approach. So little is known about ancient Baktria that there is no real story to tell. The second major idea of Lost World is a reminder of how much that we think we know about Hellenistic Baktria is now-discredited speculation. Holt's book will hopefully serve as a great "reboot" for the field of Baktrian studies.
Holt is critical of numismatic scholarship for continuing to focus the role coins play to uncover the ancient kings and battles. He believes that numismatics should move on, devising ways to deduce facts about ancient lifestyles. Statistical techniques are used to show technical errors on coins imply the coiners of ancient Ai Khanoum were probably stressed out as their civilization was dying.
The professor's critique of numismatic scholarship has some merit but he seems to paint numismatics with a single brush. So much of coin studies are done by or for collectors; it seems unfair to criticize the entire field for continuing to focus on kings.
Career academics probably do not need Holt's insights to revitalize the study of coins but perhaps collectors can consider forming interesting collections around topics other than lists of kings. People are starting to collect overstrikes. I know one advanced collector who has moved on to collecting coins made into tools and decorations in antiquity.
Recommended. Lost World of the Golden King: In Search of Ancient Afghanistan (Hellenistic Culture and Society)
This image was created using two scans on a flatbed scanner and Photoshop. Gimp can also be used. This is my first attempt at Anaglyph 3D coin photography. For the technique I credit Gerald Marks. Yesterday I attended a workshop conducted by Professor Marks at Observatory in Brooklyn.
