thanks for the comments everyone. this was a somewhat risky purchase. i didn't know the seller and the pics weren't great. i thought the style looked good. in hand, i was more at ease. it has been struck, so if it is a fake...it's a very well done struck silver fake. one of the modern struck fakes is pictured here... http://www.parthia.com/parthia_forgery.htm to me, the style is ok...but the fabric looks wrong. mine looks more like a cleaned ancient to my untrained eyes. one of the drawbacks of being relativity new to collecting (4 years this fall) and not specializing in anything and owning only a single parthian coin.... my eyes are very untrained. BobL's "thumbs up" of the coin was pretty important to me for that reason, i sent the my first pics to him as soon as i got it.
The details on your coin are stupendous. There is nothing wrong with the authenticity I think Cyrrus might have been making a joke showing you coins that dont look like they were made yesterday. Yours is ancient but it looks like it was made yesterday. Here is tetradrachm of Gotarzes II. Dated BXT and Tyche with cornucopia presenting a diadem to Gotarzes.
BTW I think Chrsmat's guy is Trajan's adversary...interesting...The reason or all Trajans titles PART etc?
if i understand this correctly, VIII was in the eastern portion of parthia, the west hit by trajan under the rule of another dude named osroes i.there was a parthian civil war going on at the time it seems. i pieced this together from wikipedia.
Although the Arsacid rulers of Parthia do share nomadic ancestry with the Huns, the Parthian rulers have only pointy hats (bashlyks) while other steppe folk, such as Huns, actually had pointy heads, intentionally deformed by head-binding of infants. The practice is believed to have been related to social status.
OMG guys! Just had an epiphany... You just have proven that the CONEHEADS are REAL! It wasn't just a movie...
It seems there has been an increased number of high-quality Parthian coins on the market these days. I don't know the source. Undisclosed hoard? Plundered museums? Convincing modern forgeries? guy
I am looking forward to your Elymais article. Ancient Doug started an interesting thread on that subject several months ago. https://www.cointalk.com/threads/ancients-elymais-coins-confuse-me.227621/ (Reviewing what I wrote, I would make a few corrections now. That said, both the history of Elymais and its coinage are fascinating and relatively unknown.) Good luck with your future article. guy
I dunno, Anoob. I was wrong once when I thought I was wrong, but I actually was right in the first place.