Please post your Moesia, Istros coins. IMO, I almost bought a fake at the last Westchester NY coin show. I passed on the coin because it had characteristics found on a bunch of fakes listed on Forum. The letters had a slight appearance as though they hade been punched. Yep, once again I almost fell for a well known fake that appeared in the Black Sea area or Bulgaria around 25 years ago. I initially selected the really sharp & high grade coin. I began feeling uneasy about the high grade coin & opted for this ch-VF instead. This one is in an NGC holder so at least some people (with better skills than me) have looked at it. The Istros coin has been on the want list for a relatively long time. There are almost always examples to be found for sale so it is obviously a pretty common coin. I found myself selecting between three different VF examples at the Westchester show. That’s not including the two EF fakes I fortunately avoided. I got this one with the E between the eagle & dolphin and the A below. The dolphin’s snout is just off the flan. Please post em if you got em.
MOESIA, Istrus AR Drachm 4th Century B.C. 5.80 grams, Obv: Inverted Heads Rev: Sea-eagle on dolphin IΣTPIH above, E between eagle & dolphin, and A below. Grade: gVF as confirmed by NGC with 5/5 strike and 2/5 surface. Other: Private sale January 2014
There are many variations: right is up left is up dolphin right fourree 1/12 stater 1/6 stater barbarous 1/3 stater?
... I like the style and strike of my lil' darling, but I must admit that I wish the flan was just a wee bit bigger or the strike was a wee bit more centered, so the poor ol' dolphin had a full snout!! (poor ol' flipper) => but overall, I'm always kinda proud to post my precious!!
Yep, that is definitely a great coin. Doug Smith's 1/12 stater is the coin that interests me. I don't think I've seen the design that small (UNTIL THIS LAST SUNDAY). I was tempted to grab a similar tiny coin at the Sunday show but decided to research a little bit before buying it. What might be a fair price to offer for a VG example of the 1/12th stater? (I believe it is a 1/12 stater). The coin I'm considering is tiny & has an archaic appearance.
Beautiful coin Collect 89. I'm glad you avoided the landmines. All this talk about fake MOESIA, Istrus coins has me reconsidering my policy of not buying slabbed ancients. Of course most of my ancients at this point are still relatively inexpensive so I doubt fakes are much of a problem in the sub $500 range. It would be good to have a list of "Top 10 most commonly faked ancients" Just like with any other coin, I'm sure the likelihood of fakes increases proportionately with the value of the coin. Thoughts?
Fakes are abundant at all price levels. I bought a $50 coin that was then diagnosed as fake here at CT. I then found a perfect match of the fake at the Forum Website (Dr. Ilya Prokopov's fakes list). There is also a section at Forum that discusses basic fake diagnostics but Dr. Ilya Prokopov's fakes list has photos of known fakes. Here is a link to the CT thread where I posted my new Mesembria coin and learned that it was fake: http://www.cointalk.com/threads/black-sea-area-mesembria-apollonia-pontika.235080/ When you are surfing the web, check-out the fake sellers list. There is a long list of ancient coin dealers that should be avoided. Here is a link: https://www.forumancientcoins.com/board/index.php?topic=18502.0
Mine arrived in the mail today... I'm as happy as an eagle pecking a dolphin. I never really took to this coin design until recently. This one sports a rather evil-looking dolphin... but just cartoon evil, mind you, not scary pagan evil like TIF's Silenus, or creepy weird evil like Steve's two-bodied owl.
Mine was $53.50 in 1998. It is hard to imagine the appearance from just 'VG' and hard to figure the effect of 15+ years. I believe there are more of these coins on the market now so the price should not have gone up as much as some coins.
