Some of you may remember the first ancient I purchased not long back. Most thought it was probably a fake. This is my second purchase. I know most of you do not like graded ancients, but I like the added comfort it gives me. Sorry for the bad pictures.
While you are right that I prefer coins not in slabs, this one is a decent coin and has appropriate information as well as grading I can live with. I recall commenting on this coin before but lost that thread. No?
Is the line on the face from a die crack? Also, is it pretty common to have doubling like the reverse shows?
Yes to both. The larger coins especially were struck with more than one blow of a heavy hammer. A bounce would make a little doubling. Some issues are made better than others but a little doubling is a minor fault. Some people collect errors but, in ancients, that means much larger errors than would be considered special on moderns.
I've noticed that "errors" are pretty much the norm with ancients, and the premiums go to the coins with good centering, good strike, etc. Kinda hard for me to change my way of thinking since I mainly collect "modern" old US gold, where off center and doubling, etc brings a premium!
Nice pickup, when you feel more comfortable with ancients you can start buying raw ones if you like. It should save you some money, and while its cool to have doubling or die cracks it doesn't add any value to ancients.
Some of us do collect errors but we seek more obvious things. Even then we don't pay extra unless a coin is very special AND high grade. Obverse doublestrike but next to worthless due to poor condition Brockage. In many cases these sell for about the same as normal coins unless extremely clear or of a period that did not usually make such errors. Flip over doublestrike where first strike was a brockage. Ugly to most but beautiful to me... Overstruck on earlier coin with both coins fully identifiable and in decent grade. This one cost extra. Double strike with severely clashed reverse die. Very educational but not expensive unless you count trying to find another... ANZ over ANH mintmark. It may be unique but nobody cares but me. Legend misspelled SANSTO for SANCTO. This is also the only one I've seen but no one cares but me. So many Byzantine coins are overstruck or double struck (or just messed up) that there is a premium for coins that are perfectly normal. If they are really bad and fully identifiable, they are salable for something near a normal price but you will not get rich on messy Byzantines. Normal ancient collectors are considered weird by most people. That makes us error collectors unspeakably odd.
Super choice for your 2nd ancient coin, jwitten (congrats) ... I also have a humble example of this type
