The other day I bought 2 lots of 100 assorted LRBs. Total price for all 200 was $146.44, or about $0.73 each. Was it worth it? Let's find out. First we'll start with the "unidentifiables." I've sorted these into three categories: Very Low Grade, Low Grade, Medium Grade, and Byzantine. 26x Very Low Grade denotes those coins with absolutely no features whatsoever. You can hem and haw at these all day, but there's just nothing there. A real shame, since the biggest as and dupondius-sized coins were in this category. x40 Low Grade. These are coins with enough detail to say "yes, it's a Roman coin" but not much else. ID'ing these would be next to impossible, but still "potentially" doable. x68 Medium Grade. These are coins with enough detail to probably positively ID, but it will be very tough. At the very least, you can identify the reverse type and make out a portrait. Some letters, but these are an ID'ers nightmare. x12 Byzantine. I don't know anything about Byzantine coins, so I really can't tell much here. A few have fully readable reversed, but obliterated obverses. One is a trachy. So, 146 out of 200 coins are unusable to me, at least. Someone else may get more use out of the Byzantines, or be able to ID the "medium grade" ones. But I certainly can't. Out of the remaining 54 coins, in order from least cool to most cool: x12 Constantius II. Reverses: two soldiers, VOT, Fel Temp x9 Valens. Reverses: Emperor dragging captive, Victory left x9 Constans. one Victory, two Victory, VOT, Fel Temp x4 Constantine I. Reverses: Commemorative, campgate, VOT, posthumous issue
Constantine II. Reverses: Campgate, two soldiers Constantius Gallus. Reverse: Fel Temp Gratian. Reverse: Victory left Julian II. Reverses: Fel Temp Licinius I(?). Reverse: two captives Aurelian. Reverse: Jupiter handing off globe. Probus. Reverses: Jupiter handing off globe, unknown
Valentinian II. Reverse: victory left Claudius II. Reverse: Salus Now the COOLEST ones! Gallienus. Reverse: Salus Arcadius. Reverses: VOT, Campgate Antoninus Pius. Reverses: Artemis, unknown AND finally, the last and arguably best/most valuable coin: Elagabalus. Reverse: something
Probably not. After taking a few for myself (namely Elagabalus and Ant Pi) it's going to be TOUGH to sell the rest and break even. oh well, at least it was a fun few hours of ID'ing...
par for the course I'm afraid. You end up with around 25% identifiable coins that might be considered collectible. In my uncleaned LRB days I was buying half-kilo bags for around $350, which contained around 250 coins. So actually you got a better deal. Did get one gem - a Macrianus antoninianus which somebody didn't pick out of the lot (a mistake no doubt) but lots of FEL TEMPS, GLORIA EXERCITVS, the two Victories, Valens, Vanlentinian, Gratian, and so on.
This seems like such a fun thing to do! Certainly more labor intensive than roll searching, and likewise more of a triumphant feeling when it's all over. Thank you for sharing your finds. Quick question as I'm not familiar with ancient coinage: what happens to the little guys that are unidentifiable? Do those carry any sort of value to collectors?
Yes! Everything has value. Not much though, I'm afraid. A bag of 40 unidentifiables you could probably sell for about $10 or so.
They make great gifts to young kids to get them engaged in history and to be holding something that is almost 2000 years old, identifiable or not. @furryfrog02 did you give some out to cub/boy scouts?
If I was 8 or 10 years old and somebody handed me an ancient Roman coin you bet I'd be over the moon.
Yeah I did. I have 14 (13 if you don't count FFIVN lol) cub scouts and they each got 2. That was most of the identifiable ones I got out of my uncleaned lots.
I doubted this was going to be profitable. I figured it's just people dumping their cull ancients in bulk. However, it's an excellent post.
That's how I got started on ancients back in the early 2000s. Some mixed lots of cleaned ancients. The I bought the Sear references (Inc Greek Imperial and Byzantine), Van Meter, the Sayles books, Vagi's 2 vol set, and most of the RIC volumes. Now, the books are worth a lot more than the coins . But I learned a lot, even if I don't actively collect ancients anymore.
Really nothing of import here. The two definite standouts are the provincial Antoninus Pius with Artemis reverse, and the provincial Elagabalus.
I had the same experience like you , some years ago I bought for 90$ 175 coins , about 0.50$ for a coin. The ebay seller put in photos two decent sestertius(the first photo) , but unfortunately he never send me those two coins. As you will see many of the coins where medium to low grade , high grade only a couple, the best was the Constantius II in the last photo. I still have all the coins and I remember that I worked hard to identify about 100 of them.
Nice deal for you! $0.50 is excellent. I'm sorry you didn't get the nice sestertii, that's a real shame. Did you at least enjoy the learning process?
Yes , was a very instructive process and also pleasant. Sincerely I didn't touch my roman coins in the last six months , now that we all have time to spend at home , I started again to identify or clean coins
