In my noble and yet unrealistic goal of sorting my miscellaneous coin accumulation, I frequently come across items that are outside of any meager knowledge I might have. Such is the case with these two coins that were handed to me by a friend recently. I have been poking about with ancients a wee bit, but I still aspire to be even a novice. Your wisdom and gentle mentoring would be appreciated. Wazzit? Just casual curiosity on my part. Thank you. The first coin is 18-19mm diameter, 4mm thick, and 6.23g wt. The second coin is ~16mm diameter, 1mm thick, and ~1g wt.
Similar to mine, but hard to pin down exact due to condition. Alexander II Mint: Apamea AE Serrate 125 to 123 BC Obvs: Head of young Dionysos r. wearing ivy wreath. Revs: BAΣIΛEΩΣ AΛEΞANΔPOY, Tyche standing left with right hand on tiller and holding cornucopia. Control mark above cornucopia 18mm, 6.1g Ref: SNG Isr.312.2367, SC 2242.3c
Why, thank you! Yes indeed, the condition does leave a bit to be desired... As ancients have not, up to now, been a direction of study for me, I had no idea how to start. I believe I need a basic primer in picking up a random ancient and deciding how best to begin to identify it.
The first looks Seleucid to my definitely untrained eyes, and the second is without a doubt a whatzit.
I have a site for identifying seleucid coins (only through Antiochus II thus far but I add entries almost daily.)
Wow! My identifying skills are far better than I thought. I had the second one down as a whatzit too. Woohoo!
I was thinking jewish prutah when I saw the second one. But I don’t know much about them at all, so I’m just guessing. Maybe it’s an ancient arcade gaming token
An acquaintance here said today that the second one "looks Indo-Greek to me." Well, thank you Bob, but I still have no idea how to even start looking into it. Oooooh, the humbling experience of stepping outside of my knowledge bases. Yikes!
Deep breath. You can do this. You have two coins that are very difficult to ID. You've already gotten an excellent lead on the first coin. The second one will take a while. Relax and enjoy the journey. I have coins in my collection that have sat around unidentified for 10, 20 years. Maybe someday I'll come up with a positive ID for them.