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.

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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.

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