Confused By Ancient Coin Values, Weights and Metals

HELP I need a basic lesson in ancient coins....PLEASE.

I was looking at Drachms, tetradrachms, staters, Octodrachms etc. Alexander III, Philip II etc. struck staters in Gold and drachms/tets in silver. The Egyptian Ptolemaic kingdom struck Octodrachms (mnaieion or worth 100 silver drachms) and Pentadrachms (trichryson) it appears only in gold, but there are Tetradrachms in both gold (also called a half mnaieion) and silver and they weigh almost the same.

How is that possible? Surely gold coins must have been worth many multiples, 10 or 15 times, even in those days, of silver coins weighing the same. Is it just a simple case of the sellers being lazy and writing Pentadrachm instead of Pentecontadrachm (50 drachms) or coining (pun intended) modern names for these coins so that they are recognizable?

I'm even more confused than after an episode of SOAP, for those of you who are old enough

Can someone please write me An Idiot's Guide to Ancient Coin and Metal Values!!!

 

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A good start would be to learn as much as you can about the Attic standard before jumping to the changes after Alexander's death.

 

Our goal is to call the coin by the same name it was called in ancient times. Often we don't know the name, but we use it when we do.

We have the word "stater", which comes from the same word in ancient Greek, and means literally "that which sets, settles". "Stater" means the standard coin.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/στατήρ#Ancient_Greek

When a coin writer says "a gold X" they may mean a gold coin with the weight of X, or they may mean a gold coin with the value of X.

We have silver staters (think a "colt" of Corinth) and gold staters (think of Alexander's Athena/Nike gold coin). They don't have the same value, but the same weight.

You will sometimes hear about special gold denominations like "gold obol" (Sicily) or "gold octodrachm" (Egypt). You will sometimes hear about special copper denominations like "AE drachm" or "AE diobol" (Egypt). I suspect these terms come from ancient Greek terms, but I am not certain. I intend to read Testimonia Numaria: Greek and Latin Texts Concerning Ancient Greek Coinage by John Melville Jones some day but there is never enough time.

Sometimes no one knows the meaning of the ancient coin terms. An ancient market inscription says “1 Cyzicene = 11 Olbia silver staters”. That was the rule for money changers. A "Cyzicene" is the ancient name for the electrum stater of Cyzicus. But what was an “Olbia silver stater”? No one knows! Olbia doesn’t have any large silver coins. (I have a theory, as yet unwritten).

 

Some of what I read makes sense now. Attic standard widely adopted, Rhodian standard was lighter but also well recognized and accepted because of trade connections and then the Phoenician standard adopted by the Ptolemaic Kingdom.....the lightest coins.

Silver was scarce and much dearer in those days hence the small multiples when valuing silver vs gold coins. Coin names appear to refer to weights attributed to the coins rather than buying power. The latter was determined by the metal i.e. gold or silver.

Thanks guys

 

This article by Robert Tye is wonderful on weights and denominations:

https://www.academia.edu/6882687/Coin_Weight_and_Historical_Metrology

This was written by Coin Talker EWC3

 

I think it is okay to be confused by our terms for various ancient-coin denominations.

What you really need to know most is the diameter, so you can judge the size of a coin in a photograph. Weights (and metal) determine the denomination, but if you read a coin is "10.86" grams that may not make the size leap to mind the way "22 mm" should. To collect ancient coins, you really need to learn how sizes expressed in mm correspond to coins in hand. For reference, a new nickel weighs 5.00 grams. A US dime is 18 mm, a cent is 19 mm, a nickel 21 mm, a quarter 24 mm, a half-dollar 30.4 mm, and a silver dollar 38 mm. When buying an ancient coin, be sure to check the size which will be given in millimeters--unless it is such a common denomination that the seller expects you to know.

As Ed noted, there are many ancient coins that are of denominations with ancient names unknown to us. If they are common coins, we make up names if we don't know them. For example, there are very many coins of the era of Constantine that we call "AE3" (17-21 mm), which is just a reference to their size. Bigger than "AE4" (anything late Roman smaller than 17) and smaller than "AE2" and much smaller than AE1 (above 25 mm, like the "bull" type of Julian II). There are many complications to Roman coin denomination after c. AD 215 when the radiate was introduced by Caracalla.

For many Greek cities we think we know what a "drachm" weighed (in Athens, it was about 17.2/4 grams = 4.3 grams). Multiples and fractions of that have names. But, if a city has a different largest-denomination, as, say, Corinth, we agree to use "stater" for that silver coin and let the scholar argue how many drachms it was. Thus, you can see denominations like "1/12 stater." (To some extent, that is an admission of our ignorance.)

You can have lots of fun reading scholarly books and finding out what we know about denominations. But, as a collector, just be sure you know the diameter of the coins you are buying from internet pictures.