That’s a pretty nicely minted and preserved coin, as ancient coins go.
It looks like it was just minted!
Beautiful!
They did nice work back then. Gold coins also didn’t circulate that much because of their great value relative to other coin types.
https://freerepublic.com/focus/bloggers/3409377/posts
https://freerepublic.com/focus/chat/3409545/posts
my first guess would be someone dropped it. no way could that be that preserved being in the elements for that long...
Yea, it was either a “fresh drop” (not long after minting), or it’s a modern knockoff using something like portrait lithography. That thing is probably going to be analyzed 9 ways to Sunday if it sees the open market.
I eyeball found a 1901 double eagle but it’d suffered a lot of post drop damage. It was a semi key date to, Philly mint, which unusually only made under 200K of them that year while San Francisco made over 2 million IIRC.
