My smallest and my largest ancient Greek coins together
My smallest and my largest ancient Greek coins together
18 comments
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Imagine having to pay for something with a bunch of hemitetartemorions. And dropping a few.
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I assume it's the reason it was so infrequently struck, it was simply impractical. Might have been before bronze coinage became widespread, it was invented on Sicily around 450 BC but might not have made it to this town when they struck these tiny things.
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Any reason you’re touching them with your bare hands? I’d assume with their ages you’d want to minimize additional degradation from oils
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Most of these coins spent more than 2000 years in the ground, after which they were cleaned mechanically or chemically, so as long as you have reasonable clean hands they will be fine.
For top grade coins maybe you want to use gloves, but it's not really necessary with the quality of coins I can afford.
It's a contrast from collecting modern coins for sure, most collectors of ancient coins will break them out of slabs. Slabs are almost only used when selling ancients to modern collectors on the American market.
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Where did you get them to know they are authentic?
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Both of these were bought at auctions or from coin dealers specializing in ancient coins :) The large one was bough on vcoins where you can generally trust the coins to be authentic.
The boring and somewhat useless answer to how I know they are authentic is experience - I've spent the better part of a decade collecting ancient coins, reading about ancient coins, and trading ancient coins...
Back when I started this community I copied a nice post from reddit on how to spot fakes.
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Which is which?
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It's so tiny, it's precious, I love it.
18 comments
Small one is a hemitetartemorion from Erythrai, 3mm and 0.09 grammes.
The other one is an OCTOBOL from Ptolemaic Egypt weighing 87.5 grammes and measuring 46mm.
How cool is it to have such pieces of history, any other fun facts about them or other pieces you like?
Yes, I was very surprised when I discovered that ancient coins were not out of my price range back in the day. I expected all ancient coins were museum pieces; the reality is that there are millions of them, and not all of them can be displayed in museums.
The octobol is a pretty interesting piece; supposedly Egypt had no silver mines to speak of, so in order to have coins with an equivalent value to the standard trade coin - the drachm - they had to strike large bronze coins instead.
Both denominations were pretty impractical; the hemitetartemorion was probably lost a lot, and the octobol would be too heavy for daily use...