So I was at a coin show this weekend. There was only one guy there selling a few ancients. I bought some out of the 3$ basket, which I will post pictures of later. I am working on trying to identify them myself. Will post them when I identify them or get stuck. He focused mainly on biblical ancients, but he had a couple other ancients there. One though stood out because it had a green tag and it was obviously a early BC coin, you know how they have that look to them. I read the tag and it said something along the lines of and I only know cause I had to look the coin up: KINGS of PARTHIA. Mithradates II 121-91 BC. AR Drachm Contemporary Counterfeit I looked very long and had and there was no bubbling or anything on the surface. So it wasn't cast, It looked smooth, I had my magnifying glass with me. I didn't look at it under a microscope though. The back of the coin was slightly worn where some of the letters couldn't be made out towards the top. So it looks like it did circulate. I know it would be hard to say without a picture, but I am really curious. To me everything looked totally fine and looked like a regular ancient. It didn't have the slice mark in it, where they test the metal. Would the only give away have been the weight? Which I didn't take note of, but only thing in retrospect I can think of. Ok, so my understanding of the words contemporary counterfeit, mean a counterfeit coin but made from the correct time period. Is this true with ancients? If so how do they know it is really counterfeit? He wan't 30$ for it which is another thing? Why so much for a counterfeit? When encountering ancients how do you tell a real one from a counterfeit if it wasn't cast? I guess, please explain this one to me.
Ancient counterfeits are collectable in their own right. It's like modern coin collectors collecting Henning nickels or putting together collections of fake Morgan dollars.
You got it. Contemporary means it was made at the same time, so it is indeed an ancient coin, just not an official issue. Most counterfeits will be cheaper than their mint partners, but not significantly so.
There's an important difference, though, between ancient and modern counterfeits. Ancient ones were introduced into circulation and could be classified as something like a private/illicit token coinage. Modern fakes are not aimed at circulation usually but at collectors, so they are without interest from the point of view of the history of economics and monetary circulation.
