Which country has the most beautiful SILVER coins?

With a coin repertoire such as yours, I'm sure you could.

To be different, maybe we should put guns and cars on the coins, but it still comes down to weapons and modes of transportation. Also, no matter the era, we will always place beautiful women on everything. No way to be original.

Do you think modern designs have improved on the ancients?

 

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Here's a couple of mine. :thumb:

 

Oh yea lonegunlawyer, I can just imagine your conjured images of Susan B. Agony and Eunice Shriver right the nows:devil:

 

I do think they could have used a makeover before being put on a coin.

 

Even that is not original since a lot of the lore is based on Mesopotamia or perhaps from Harappas (Kali for example).

 

Perhaps none of our thoughts or feelings are original. Perhaps thoughts and feelings and the physical manifestations of those are being relived from generation to generation and culture to culture.

 

I love scottish hammered coins too!!

 

Australia would be my favorite too.

 

I favour France. Classic beauty.

 

Gotta love that triple action on the 50 Francs coin.

 

I think modern coins are more industrial, with more cost implications to deal with, than ancients. In many ways the ancients had it easy and didn't worry about a lot of things modern mints have to worry about, like stacking, cost per unit, perfect reproduction.

Having said that, I think most people overlook the immensity of the legacy the ancient greeks gave us for coinage. Basically the entire concept and idea of beauty on coins have come directly from the first coins produced in the world.

That was my only point. I find the Britannia coins attractive, I just wanted to illustrate its beauty is a direct gift from the ancient greeks.

 

While the ideas of many ancient coins were quite good, the execution of many is simply lacking. For example, I love the old quadriga and biga designs. But, because of technology limitations, they were simply not able to reach the level of execution of modern means (e.g., the quadriga coin I posted earlier designed by Davide Calandra and used on Italian coins of the early 20th century). We all have different perceptions of beauty, but from a purely aesthetic and perfectionistic view regarding the execution of the "trade", the modern coins blow the ancients out of the water.

So, while I give the Greeks an "A" for effort, they get about a "C-" for execution. It's not their fault -- they were just born 2 millennia too early.

 

Off topic but IMO i think too much credit and focus is given to ancient Greek due to the western bias, and not much to other civilizations which predate it but that discussion is for another thread i suppose.

 

+1 I would like to see a more in depth discussion on this.

 

Problem is that even the money used in your country has a line of ancestors, so to say, that goes back to ancient Rome, Greece and Lydia. If it was based on Pre-Columbian money (hypothetically) or on ancient Chinese money* for example, your perspective would probably be a different one ...

(* They sure had cash, but AFAIK the early pieces were mostly copper.)

Christian

 

I collect all of them sir, the three great centers of coin invention, Greece, China, and India. While I love your idea that too much credit is given to the greeks as the "inventors" of coinage, (they were, but not the only ones), I do believe the Greek coins are rightly viewed as the most beautiful. Chinese and Indian coins were more "industrial", more tailored for ease of day to day use, while Greek coins very much were used as propaganda for their cities and as such artistry was highly valued. Some engravers actually made their living going to different cities to cut beautiful dies, and were fairly famous artists. Indian and Chinese coins simply did not use coins this way, so no effort for artistry was given, (well not "no" artistry, the chinese were extremely concerned with balancing a coin, I mean here more "pictorial artistry").

 

Peru has some nice silver.

 

and Chile

 

Bolivia is also up there somewhere,

 

I love this trade dollar.