hello, i got this coin before couple of years ago, i don't know any thing about it, iam not able to identify it.., please help me with the identification and the value. thanks. .
It would be much easier to tell what coin this was intended to replicate if the pictures were in focus, and cropped to eliminate all that burlap, you gave some hint as to their size.
sorry about my bad pictures capturing, but iam trying my best in case of iam not that good with taking pictures : D So here are more new pics, thanks
I don't know what coin that is but this is just a tid-bit of advice: even if your coin has wear on it you shouldn't hold it with tweezers or metal prongs. You could cause further damage to the coin.. Someone will come by soon to help you out with your piece, they always do
Well it's a tetradrachm from Alexandria, Egypt from the second half of the third century AD. The obverse has a Roman emperor, though I can't tell which one it is. Can you read any of the writing on the front better than we can in the pictures? Can you also tell me whether what's on the back is LA or LDelta? It looks like there's an A with short legs, but it's a bit hard to tell. This would tell us whether it's from this emperor's first or fourth year in office.
About the front, i cant see any thing written on it, i guess there are no thing written on it... And about the back, it looks like "LA" but not so sure : D well, i saw some pics for other tetradrachm written on them "LN", so i think it is "LA" not "LDelta" for sure.
The text is there, but it's very hard to read. It's all the lumpy stuff above and to the right of the bust. It's largely off the flan (it's pretty common for ancient coins to be struck off center), and I'm having a lot of trouble making anything out of it. In case it wasn't clear, by "delta," I meant the Greek letter delta, which is a triangle. I can't quite tell from the picture if it's an A with stubby legs or a delta with serifs. In any case, I suppose you want to know what it's worth, given the forum you posted this in. Unfortunately, Alexandian tetradrachms of this era are pretty common, and yours is a bit overcleaned, and given the poor legend on the obverse, there's a good chance we won't be able to identify it more specifically, which will hurt the value a bit. I wouldn't expect to be able to get more than $10 or so from it.
The coin appears genuine. An Alexandrian tetradrachm of a third century emperor. The letters LΔ are the date, the fourth year of the emperor's reign. It looks like Macrinus on yours, but I don't have my book on Alexandrian coins to confer with right now.
I did mean to say Macrinus, but you are right. The corrosion behind the bust is messing with my eyes. I knew it didn't seem right - I couldn't readily find any images of a Macrinus tet. On thinking again, it could be Geta or Severus Alexander. Again, I'd want to look at other Alexandrian portraits of these emperors to compare.
wow, looks like i got rare one or something , lol : D well, if that happened and we found the handsome emperor is Macrinus, since he ruled for only 14 months, then it could be valuable rare coin right ?!
If it's Macrinus, then that would indeed make it more valuable, but the fact that it's a fourth year coin makes that identification very unlikely. If Ardatirion is correct about this being early 3rd century rather than late, then it would be more valuable than what I was expecting (though not necessarily by much), but you would need to confirm identification for that to matter.
I still think it's later third century, probably tetrarchic. Compare the shape of the portrait to this one of Galerius. I think the coin here is just too worn to make out the beard. It's definitely much closer to that than a Severus Alexander issue of which this appears rather typical portrait wise (at least going by what's on VCoins). That said, I'm far from an expert on these (I only own two Alexandrian tets, both of Nero), so feel free to correct me. Edit: Freesoul, don't get excited by the price of the Galerius coin I linked to, as it's not indicative of the value of your coin at all.
i will continue with my search to identify it with the third century coins pic in google, and until this time, i will keep trying to clean the corrosion form it. by the way, i remembered something...., before couple of years ago when i got this coin, the man who gave me it told me that his grandfather found it in the desert. so is it possible to be undiscovered type of the 3rd century coins ?? and if that will be true, then maybe we will not be able to identify it with the 3rd century listed known coins ??
Don't clean this further! It's already overcleaned, and you're not going to help it at all by more cleaning. Besides, there's probably nothing there that would help with identifying it. That makes sense. It was a coin minted for local circulation in Egypt. It's possible, though we'd need to be able to tell more about it for this before we could reach that conclusion. Our issue here is that the coin doesn't seem to be intact enough to identify easily. Busts over the third century became more and more alike, making it hard to tell emperors apart, and yours is worn enough where it seems that Arditirion and I can't even agree if it has a beard! We generally use the text on the front for identification, but I can't make any of that out enough to help us at the moment. To prove that it's an unknown type, we would need this text, as there isn't anything else about this coin that is particularly unusual. Basically, our issue is not that we can't find any coin that seems to match what you have, it's that we can find so many that we can't really narrow it down. I would place my bets on this being a rather common coin of one of the tetrarchs (Diocletian, Maximian, Constantius I, or Galerius), or perhaps of one of the emperors from just before that like Aurelian or Probus.
