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To: SunkenCiv

I’ll bet they will be worth a pretty penny.


3 posted on 04/23/2010 8:19:13 AM PDT by Travis McGee (---www.EnemiesForeignAndDomestic.com---)
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To: Travis McGee

:’) These might be very rare. I’m not up on ancient coins. They are fascinating, and most are not unique, which is amazing. They tended to not be round, but many of the stamps on obverse and reverse were round. Even when they started off round (a practice that may have been standardized by the Romans), they’d get shaved down. Often they were made, checked for weight, carved down to get to the right weight, then stamped, so they were somewhat irregular in shape to begin with. The Kingdom of Lydia (part of what is now Turkey) is generally credited with coined money, and the Lydians had reliable means to assuring purity which made their coins widely accepted, also widely reused (melted down and turned into other coins), and their territory tempting to the Persian Empire.

Among the rarest ancient coinage is the coin of Sejanus, Emperor Tiberius’ right hand man, who was allowed to put his own image on coins. Not long after his plot to overthrow Tiberius was uncovered (or maybe was concocted, but that’s doubtful), he was strangled in his cell (not stabbed as shown in “I Claudius”), and his statues and inscriptions — and coins — were trashed. Only twelve of his coins are known to have survived, and being from early in the empire, are precious metal. Later Roman coins were bronzes, and they often haven’t fared well during their centuries in the soil, where they were buried as the barbarian hordes swept in, and those who’d buried them didn’t live long enough to dig ‘em up.


24 posted on 04/23/2010 7:07:41 PM PDT by SunkenCiv ("Fools learn from experience. I prefer to learn from the experience of others." -- Otto von Bismarck)
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