Ancient Gold Authentic?

The composition will give you away. Gold coins from antiquity were very impure.

 

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Josh you should really invest in a few books , it's like you have no concept about how coins were made . You said coins being minted by machines have little or no errors involved . But in fact they do . One of the coins I collect are Bust halves , we classify these by Overton # . Which is the study of die marriages and how they are all different because they were made by hand . Especially the lettering and Date were all punched into each die by hand , so their placement and sometimes the punches themselves were different . Or they'd use an 1813 punched die in 1814 , so they'd take a 4 punch and punch the 4 over the 3 creating an over date .Even the Dies themselves would change over their use from wear from the flow of metal causing the stars to elongate and other changes . These are ways to tell if a coin is real or fake . Knowledge is power .

 

That's not accurate. Roman aurei have some of the highest purity of any coins, even modern issues, at over 99% pure gold.

 

Maybe he's thinking of some of the earliest coins made from electrum .

 

I believe he was referring to ancient Greek coins. Speaking of purity, it's another reason Josh's plan wouldn't work. If you dug a nugget in say, Charlotte, then the composition would be different then that of one dug in Greece (and this still ignores smelting).

 

The most certain sign of ignorance when speaking of ancient coins is the making of statements about 'the ancients' as if they were one people in one time who followed some sort of 'how to be an ancient' handbook. In coins, there are pure and debased. In pure, there are 99% pure and quite a variety of trace elements that help pin down where the ore originated. To make things worse, some, not all, issues incorporated older coins in the melt to make newer ones so it is always possible there will be a strange trace in an unexpected place. I agree with AJ that all his coins are 99.9% certainly genuine. When people start saying 100%, I can not go along.

 

... not to threadjack or completely out myself as a huuuge SciFi nerd, but now that @dougsmit made his point about "the ancients", all I can think of is SG1.

 

Believe me, there are quite a few collectors of ancients, including myself, that would love to have a portal to the past. We could answer some cloying questions.

Us modern folk tend to view ancient peoples as simplistic and lacking in subtlety. My wife calls it chronological snobbery. In fact, many ancient cultures were every bit as clever and sophisticated as we are today, albeit less technologically advanced.

Archeological finds fill in quite a few gaps, but they often pose as many questions as they answer. Of course, if I did have such a portal I'm sure nobody would mind if I brought back a few bagfuls of aureii.

 

I prefer "technologically advanced in a different way" since they could do a few things we have only recently 'discovered'.

If you go back and bring back aureii, you will make rather little profit since an aureus was a lot of money then. Bring back bags full of mint state sestertii (100 equal an aureus in value). A common soldier made roughly four a day so we might equate them to $20 at most. Have you seen what mint state sestertii of ~68 AD bring? If you go to Athens, leave those tetradrachms alone and bring me a bag of obol fractions.

 

I would say that your knowledge as well as a few other learned ancient collectors have finally broken me of being solely a US collector. My ancient collection is nothing to brag about, but it's nice to understand where my passion began a couple of thousand years ago.

I thank you all for the education that I get here. I've even learned about countries that I didn't even know existed. Maybe one day I can come to grips with cleaning a coin and calling it conservation. Clearly I have much to learn.

 

Don't we all!