Hi everyone I am looking for low grade coins, preferrably a handful of them, since I am on a budget. Ebay seems very suspicious with their cheap uncleaned selections. What are some good sources for them ? Or are any members here selling some low grade ancients ? Thanks.
Before reading that a lot of fakes come out of the Balkans, I ordered 10 uncleaned from a Croatian seller on ebay. Having said that, he's sold a ton of them and some of the buyers who left feedback seem to be quite knowledgeable with no complaints.
Some of my favorite dealers for lower priced ancient coins, in no special order: bargainbinancients.com VCoins dealers: David Connors Incitatus Coins Zurqieh Really, doing a keyword search from the main page of VCoins is a great way to find anything, and also to compare the pricing of different dealers on similar coins. All while staying in a theoretically more ethical environment with trusted, professional dealers. FORVM Ancient Coins also has good deals and lots of resources, including their own network of forums like these. They are a great place for a beginner to shop but also offer more advanced material.
I was buying hoards from crustyromans.com but they recently stopped doing business. Typically I would buy one half to one kilo of coins for around $300- $500 and would find about 50% of them attributable. One half kilo typically was around 250 coins whereas one kilo was around 480-500 coins. Typically late roman bronze but with many other interesting coins in there, such as roman provincials, folles, antoniniani, and some earlier issues such as a denarius of Septimius Severus, with an occasional Greek, Byzantine, or Judaean coin thrown in. Attributing them was lots of fun. I don't know anything about some of the other outlets so I will have to check them out. Right now I'm resuming buying individual coins on a selective basis so I can focus on getting a coin of each emperor.
Zurqieh? Really? Where even the silver coins have yellow desert sand patina. I would not recommend that dealer at all. Fake patinas, and in some cases outright fake coins (he had 6 or 7 "die match" Parthian just last week that were clearly fake).
Oops. Sorry. I shall defer to your superior experience, then. Scratch the Zurqieh recommendation. Admittedly, my experience with them is but one or two purchases and a lot more browsing. I got a slighly sandy Aurelian ant from them at a good price, (<$20) and it looked fine to me. I'll try to retrieve pix of it. @Aethelred has it now. Come to think of it, I did wonder a little bit how they had so many nicely patinated coins for such seemingly low prices... Edit: here. This was $20 from Zurqieh. Looked good in hand, but what do I know? Yea or nay? Good, or fake patina? School me.
Thanks. Wow, that is some rapier wit. Remind me to never do anything underhanded that @Bob L and @red_spork, et al might discover! That's the sharpest, most devastating smackdown I've seen in a while. I notice it was posted during my hiatus earlier this year. I'm impressed, embarrassed, and perhaps not quite so blissfully trusting of the VCoins Code of Ethics now. Or desert patinas. Yikes. I'd heard about applied patinas but never really saw many examples of it being done on such a scale.
Well, sorry to have broken the news to you, but one should be suspicious of how almost every single bronze coin in his inventory has yellow desert patina. Apply some alcohol to this puppy and I guarantee you the fake patina will just melt away, revealing the truth (the patina was applied to make an aVF with some surface issues look like a solid VF without any surface issues, and sell it for a few extra bucks).
Vcoins is 100 times better than eBay, but it is not perfect, as the continued shenanigans from Athena Numismatics and Zurqieh have demonstrated. They, and any others that pull these stunts, should be named and shamed. However, I've bought from many other Vcoins dealers without any problem, and they really live up to the Vcoins code of Ethics. Dealers like Ancient Imports, Civitas Galleries, Ken. Dorney, London Ancient Coins, Lodge Antiquities, Numiscomer, and Coin India. I'm sure there are many others that also adhere to that code too.
I purchased 2 things from Vcoins 2 years ago and it went smooth. I will look up what sellers they were.. ebay seems to be a hit or miss.
Hi I found some intresting coins from dealer Zurqieh in vcoins.com . Below is the link. https://www.vcoins.com/en/stores/zurqieh-171/ancient-coins/Default.aspx are those coins in his listings are genuine? is it safe to buy coins from this dealer?
