My First Ancient

Well, I received my first ancient the other day, from stainless.
I must say, as much as I do bash "dirt" this coin has some real beauty to it. I'm not a full blown ancient collector yet, but will pick some up along the way.
Without further ado, I give you....THIS;




There is some info on the little flip it came in, but I can't read it all, well I can read it, but don't really understand it. Could some "decode" it? lol
Hope I get all this right, but here is what it says,

"Gallienus (AD253-268)
AE Antoninianus
His radiate bust r./ annona? Standing I. Silvered"


And how would I describe something like this. If I were to upload this on my website, basically, what would I say?

Thanks All

 

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Ancients are so cool, Been thinking about doing a little dabbling!

 

Nice coin. With the help of a couple forum members, I have a few ancients too. They are kind of addictive, unfortunatly i'm not in the position right now to add to them.

 

Sure. Stuff like this is actually pretty easy once you get used to ancients.

I probably don't need to tell you this, but that's the emperor's name and the years of his reign, during which this coin was struck.

This is referring to the metal the coin is made from. AE is the chemical symbol for copper, and it's used to identify copper, brass, and bronze coins. AR is used for coins that are mostly silver, and AV or AU is used for gold. Coins of debased gold are electrum, and debased silver are billion, and usually those terms are not abbreviated if they are used. This coin might actually have a very small amount of silver in it, which would make it billion.

This is the denomination. It was worth 2 denarii, and at one point, it was mostly silver, though by this period, they had been debased so much that there wasn't much there, perhaps only in the wash applied to the coin to give it a silver appearance.

This is what's on the obverse. It's the head of the emperor right wearing a radiate crown (this crown was basically a denomination mark by this point meaning that the coin was double the value of another).

This is what's on the reverse. It's Annona, the personification of the grain dole, which was a public distribution of free grain given to the citizens of Rome. By putting this on the coin, the emperor is reminding the people of his generosity and his role in this event.

This means that it still has some of the silver wash that was applied to show that the coin theoretically has some amount of silver in it. Silvering usually isn't present in high amounts on most coins that have survived.

I would say something like:

Galienus (AD 253-268)
Silvered Antoninianus

Obverse: "GALIENVS AVG," radiate bust of emperor right

Reverse: Annona standing left

If you're going to show it to people who aren't into ancients, you might want to include some of the information I wrote earlier. You also might want to see if you can find a specific reference for this coin, which I might be able to help you with later.

 

Gao, this is absolutely perfect!
Answered all my questions! Thanks So Much! :hail:

 

Mirabile dictu! If I knew it would only take a beat-up old Gallienus, I'd have sent you one sooner. I've recently taken a shine to the coinage of Gallienus. Its some of the ugliest coinage of the whole Empire, but that just makes finding a good one even more exciting.

As per the write up, I've been planning on making a big post about style. But for now, I recommend you copy something like mine:

Gallienus
AR antoninianus – 19mm
Antioch, 255-256 AD
radiate draped bust r.
IMP CP LIC GALLIENVS PF AVG
Gallienus standing l. holding sceptre, presenting Victory to Valerian, standing r., holding globe and scepter
VIRTVS AVGG
RIC Va Antioch 456

 

Cool dirt, Ardy.
I personally like the obverse of these coins, very striking. Detail is great, once seeing these coins in hand.
Still think they are dirt, but I think some of these can beautiful.

 

Gallienus offers one of the most varied set of coins when it come to quality and workmanship. During his 15 years inflation took the so-called silver coin from poor silver to not much silver at all requiring addition of a thin silver wash to make the things appear to be silver. You can get coins that look like silver and coins that look like copper and anything in-between but they will be the same denomination. Workmanship varied along with the metal. Some coins are round and some are extremely ragged. Yours has a nice portrait die and little wear but the strike quality is not so great (esp. on the reverse).

He also issued coins from several mints but did not use mint marks so you have to become sensitive to the style differences to separate them. Finally, he issued a lot of different types. Oddly some of the most interesting ones came during the period of worst workmanship.

I'll attach a range of examples.




Gallienus may not be the best choice for a first ancient for someone who comes from the grade driven world of US coins. There are rulers with more consistently beautiful coins. However when it comes to interest and variety, he is hard to beat.

 

Wonderful post!
And I really like the first one you posted, a very nice ancient, IMO.
I do have one question for you, why was the workmanship so bad, and what made it so bad?

 

COOL shape and design too. Stainless and RickieB sure are (openly) sneaky with getting folks hooked on Ancients and Currency, respectively. LOL! :smile

 

And one last question I have for now is if anybody can make my background in my photos completely black, like that of Gao's?
That is how I edit all my coins, with nothing more than a black background and the slab label if any.
I keep trying but nothing seems to work. Any help?

 

T$: I suppose that you mean you want to get a blacker black in your digital backgrounds, yes?

If you can adjust (choose) your palette colors numerically and work in either RGB or CMYK modes in your graphics editing software, then try to set the values that way rather than picking some other selective way.

In the simplest forms there are two color modes: CMYK and RGB.

CMKY (Cyan/Magenta/Yellow/Black) is a four color ink set up for hard copy print output, not for on screen display (RGB).

Try to set your CMYK values to: C=0, M=0, Y=0, K=100 (K is the label for black). Now this black (K=100) may look 'flat' to your eyes. So you can adjust that to a "Rich Black", or a mixture of colors that work together to make a more velvety or lush black mixture, such as: C=60, M=60, Y=40, K=100.

For onscreen viewing, web use, jpeg file color format type, use the RGB color mode (RED/GREEN/BLUE) and set your color values to all zero: R=000, G=000, B=000.

Those are some simple adjustments for playing with the colors numerically to help get you started.

 

That would adjust the whole photo, not looking for that.
I have my photos with black backgrounds all around so the coin is just itself.
In this photo, there is black, and then the white background that I had the coin resting on.
Here is an example of one of my photos;

The background is completely black and the only other spot of color that is different is the coin itself
When you like at my ancient, I can't crop it 100% using photoscape in a perfect circle, simply because the coin isn't a perfect circle, so I have a partial black background.
I was wanting to know if anybody could fix that problem for me, so it is 100% black, background wise

 

Ah, I SEE!, Sorry, I was thinking you had layered images, a flat black background and a layer with the coins selected and no background around them (transparent).

At any rate, can you select the object (the irregular ancient coin) with a drawing tool, to clip out that irregular shape and place it over the flat black background? You need to be able to make a custom selection of the outline shape of your coin to crop out the white area that you are seeing. A simple elipse selection tool to crop will not work for you. I don't know what software you are using to do your editing. I use Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator for such work. Maybe you can find a free application called Gimp online if your software doesn't have the capability to select objects as I was suggesting.

 

I have used GIMP and IMO it is a piece of crap. It is very confusing, and it is hard to get the hang of.
I've also tried paint, to do what you are talking about but it won't come out accurate. I was just wondering if there was a simple way to have my coin in a black background, and if anybody could do it.

 

NIce one I havent found a nice one yet for my self

 

Pics are a little small. Care to tell us a little about them? :smile

And thank you Krispy

 

Glad to help! It looks great. :thumb:

 

One way that you can do it is if you have windows open up with paint. Use the eraser to take out the color around the coin and then use the little paint jar to fill it with black. You can also use the brush or spray can to hit areas you missed with the eraser.

That's how I do it anyhow. I'm sure there's a better way but I aint that computer smart.

 

Oops, a little late