Anybody want to take a shot at the most imitated coins of all time? I'm not talking about counterfeits, but rather official coins whose design imitated the design of another coin. My list of the most imitated ancient coins includes Athenian Owl tetradrachms; Philip II staters, tetradrachms, and drachms; Alexander the Great/Philip III tetradrachms and drachms; Thasos tetradrachms; Claudius asses; Claudius Gothicus and similar antoniniani; and various Constantinian bronze. What about more recent coins?
The maria Theresa Thaler comes to mind - it has been minted in vurtually the exact same form since the mid 1700's. It is still being minted today.
Almost all rare U.S. coinage has been counterfeited,and in particular the key dates in recent series,like the 1916-D Mercury Dime and the 1922 plain Lincoln Cent. Also, how about "Liberty" on coins? Besides U.S. Colombia's early coinage has very "U.S. looking" coinage depicting Liberty. ~ Jim
What do you mean by "most"? For sheer volume, the US Walking Liberty Half Dollar is a direct copy of the French Semeuse by Oscar Roty. Charles Barber's "Liberty" series of dimes, quarters, and half dollars is likewise a copy of the French Republican coin of the same era. Similarly, the reverse of the Barber Dime is the same "Cereal Wreath" previously used on US Coins. Getting away from "coins" if you look at paper money from the mid-20th century, you can see that the "US Look" was widely copied in the dependent states from Latin American countries such as Ecuador, Columbia, and Bolivia and Mexico to the Philippines (and therefore to Japanese Invasion Money, as well). In your other post on RCC, you mentioned the so-called barbaric imitations of the coins of the Tetrici. There I said that I am not sure that those were "imitations" as much as they were the "real thing" for what they were. Read the history of the Gallic Empire. Japanese Kanei Tsuho imitated Chinese cash. How do you differentiate that from the very fact that Chinese Cash imitated itself for 2000 years? What we have is a consistent type and fabric, but issued by a succession of different lines of authority. Is that imitation? In a sense _MOST_ coinage is imitative. There was hardly an innovation in metallic money until the invention of the Silver Art Bar in America.
