Anyone here win my coins?

The Parthicus Collection sale in CNG eAuction 396 ended earlier today, and I am wondering if anyone here won some of my (former) coins? If so, please post here- I want to know that my coins are going to good homes!

 

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I wish I had...

 

Sadly, no ... I had a bid on 365, but I was outbid

https://cngcoins.com/Coin.aspx?CoinID=335309




... I only have so much coin-fuel ... so after I won those first 4 targets, I wasn't able to raise my bid on your sweet example (super cool coin)

Curious, did your coins fare okay?

 

I didn't but I was looking through them last week and the bids seemed to be strong. Hopefully it went well for you.

 

I wanted a souvenir from the sale and went for this one. I didn't win it, but it's going to a good home - Clio's (it'll have alot of friends ).

On the other hand, I won a group lot of bronzes, so now I have 11 souvenirs . I hope the sale went well for you. Some looked like they realized really good prices.

 

I won 5 lots, 13 coins total. I will be pleased to have these ex-Parthicus coins in my collection! They will be well taken care of, Parthicus. Congrats on the sale. The breadth of the collection is remarkable...very impressive! Well done!

Orodes II, obol, Sellwood 48.15:



Vologases I, diobol, Sellwood “New Parthian Coin Types,” Numismatic Chronicle 149, 1989, type 2:


Pakoros I, tet, Sellwood 73.7-8 var.:


Lot of six billon tets of Vologases IV:


Lot of four billon and AR tets of Vologases II and III:

 

I didn't. I recall looking through some last week.
I didn't go after but a few, ending up winning the one coin I bid on opening day & never looked at again until this morning. Cool hammer at opening big though. The others I was outbid on. A very modest bids anyway.
Hope all went well with your sales @Parthicus

 

I was the underbidder on an Arsakes II.

 

I think it's great that you care enough to ask! We are custodians of these coins. They become like family after a while, perhaps better than family because we can "pick" our coins! Selling all or part of a collection is hard for me, and I'm sure it was for you. I hope you've not relinquished the pursuit.

 

Wish I had! I had my eye on the Musa but couldn't swing it right now.

 

lol, the way you worded this thread, i thought you looking for coins someone outbid you on><

 

Thanks for the replies, everyone! @Bob L., I hope you will enjoy new coins as much as I did.

Overall, I am pretty happy with the results of the auction. The individual lots mostly sold for about what I expected. Some of the group lots went too cheaply, though (at least compared to what they might have brought if split up individually). Well, at least the purchasers of the group lots are going to be very satisfied with the value they receive .

Oh, and I am still very much continuing in the hobby. I don't plan to build up a Parthian collection this extensive again, but I have purchased a few choice Parthians in the last few months, and plan to purchase more. Not to mention my Sasanians, Romans, etc.

 

Did you sell these to change your collecting direction?

A super collection you had assembled.

John

 

A bit late, but being in Europe, coins arrive a lot later than in the USA. In that CNG auction, I won a nice Sassanian drachm of Hormizd IV, was that yours, too? I will treat it in a separate thread, soon.

 

@Pellinore: No, I did not have any Sasanian coins in the auction, just Parthian and a couple of related (Indo-Parthian). But I look forward to seeing a write-up of your new coin!

 

Please pardon the almost-5-years-old bump, but perhaps it is especially relevant once again... (I didn't see any other posts on the recent Parthian fractions at auction.)

I bid unsuccessfully (two weeks ago) on the ex- @Parthicus diobol pictured above and am regretting failing to bid on the obol today (both now ex- @Bob L. and having been illustrated in the KOINON I "Introduction to Parthian Silver Fractions, the Little Anomalies of Arsacid Coinage").

But today I did win a different one of the @Bob L. 's group of Parthian diobols from the KOINON article (Fig 21, previously Sellwood collection from Baldwin's Auction 100).

Though it wasn't mentioned in the CNG listing, it's also PDC 23257 (it appears much "greener" in that photo!), where @Charax (alongside his photo credit) noted it was David Sellwood's "Tray 22, 1935."

I'm new to Parthian coinage (preceding the KOINON article, the CT and other posts on Parthian Fractionals caught my attention a while ago, so I was excited to see these ones coming back onto the market). I haven't yet checked if Sylloge Numorum Parthicorum VII illustrates the type, but in the past few hours I've re-read Sellwood's (1989) article on "New Parthian Coin Types" and begun assembling a file of all the examples I can find of his Pl. 42, 1 & 2 types. (I've come across more examples than I had expected, but it looks like not too many dies.)

Hopefully I can find something to contribute about these coins now that I'll be taking custody of this one!

 

Question: why were the tets done in poorer silver than the regular drachmae?

 

Congrats. There is no better pedigree than "Ex-Sellwood Collection" when it comes to collecting Parthians.

It doesn't. Since the Fars fractions were, it seems, not official imperial issues of Parthia-proper, SNP excludes them. Here's an excerpt from the KOINON article that addresses the issue:
"The first published volume of the Sylloge Nummorum Parthicorum (Volume 7, from 2012) excluded the coins from the Fars hoard. The omission is glaring considering the fact that the hoard included diobols attributed by Sellwood and others to four of the kings who reigned during the span covered by this inaugural SNP volume. Author Fabrizio Sinisi (presumably with the endorsement of editors Michael Alram, Vesta Sarkhosh Curtis, and Daryoosh Akbarzadeh) explained, in his introduction, that he considers the Fars fractions to be of ‘uncertain attribution’ and thus he opted not to affirm Sellwood's conclusions by cataloging them. Instead, SNP 7 includes only coins from the Ecbatana, Seleucia, Mithradatkart, and (possibly) Rhagae mints, none of which produced AR fractions during the reigns of these kings. As far as Sinisi is concerned, ‘with regard to the silver series…no fractions of the drachm (are) attested (to) after Orodes II.’"

This is an interesting project. In his 1989 article, Sellwood speculated that there were only about 15 extant examples of each, type 1 and type 2. I suspect his estimate is too low, based as it was on earlier appearances of these coins on the market. I'll be curious to see what you discover. Sellwood's New Parthian Types article was written about six years after the distribution of the first round of these coins. As Michael Alram stated in 1987 (in his essay Die Vorbildwirkung Eer Arsakidischen Münzprägung), the initial Fars fractions to hit the market, in Europe of autumn 1984, were part of a 1981 find. As far as I know, the original find and the initial distribution of the Fars fractions were undocumented. It's unclear whether every example we see across sales listings since then is from that single find, or whether more have since been found.

 

Many thanks for the additional background, Bob! Not knowing the literature yet I suppose I wouldn't be in a position to fault anyone for being conservative about what counts as "attested" enough, but it sounds like a good thing you've helped bring more attention to these coins.

One of my favorite collecting areas is "the modern history of classical numismatics," especially networks of collections/collectors, and how collections, both private and public, shape the scholarship (and vice versa). These fractions open a great window onto those topics.

In my first glance I think I found about a dozen examples (though I may not have ruled out all duplicates yet across ACSearch, Forum gallery, the various Parthia coin websites, etc.), and I'm sure more are readily found online. Even if I get no further (though I have a few preliminary thoughts about the dies), it may be useful to share online the small corpus of all the examples I can find.

 

I hope you do this, and look forward to viewing it someday.