I'm having a difficult time with this one

I can't get a lead on this coin. It is very rough and I can't pick up enough info to get a start. Any help would be appreciated.

 

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Hadrian?

 

The important part of the name has been scraped out. I think I read (IM)P CAES(....)RIANVS AVG

Which makes me think Hadrian.

Size and weight?

 

Thanks
6.25 g
25 mm

 

Worn As of Hadrian?

 

That's very light for an As. Someone will know it

 

Teach me folks. I know little to nothing about ancients like this. I see MANY scrapes and scratches. Is that common practice and accepted? Would that be a normal thing since they are perhaps a thousand or so years old and would be encrusted with green tarnish? If you don't know ..ASK! I am asking. I have a few ancients I got in bulk trades but I don't hold them with much interest.

 

These aren't finished yet. I need to get more detail. This is what it looked like when I started.

 

ahhhhh so cleaning them with high details is allowed and encouraged with ancients? Again I don't know the rules and guidelines for ancients. Thanks for your input though. I love learning this stuff. Old Dogs CAN learn, we just forget fast too lol

 

Well, there are some things that are discouraged. I sometimes go a bit beyond what may be normal acceptance standard. I try not to disturb the base metal. But my goal is to get a coin that is difficult to identify and bring it to life. Be careful, I have only been doing this for about two years. There are many on this forum that are better qualified than I am.

 

I would agree with CT'ers here... Hadrian was my first thought as well. No idea on the reverse though...

 

Thanks, I appreciate all the help. When I get it zeroed in I will put my findings up.

 

I'd suggest an alternative meathod of cleaning if you're causing all the scratches and the tooling around the letters.

 

Yes, heating in a weak solution of hydrogen peroxide / sodium hydroxide removes the patina but also avoids the scratches from mechanical cleaning. It's less harsh than electrolysis, and leaves coins with a dark brown colour rather than shiny.

 

I don't think I am doing any "tooling". I am not removing any base metal. I am removing 2000 years of built-up dirt. It needs to be removed in order to see what the letters are. Look above and see what I started with. I do the minimum necessary. Thanks for the comment. I learn something every time I clean one.

 

Here's a worn Hadrian as I have that sort of looks like yours. This one weighs 11.34 grams which is more typical for an as; I have seen very worn ones weigh a lot less. I like coins like this - they are affordable - but sometimes you can have a tough time attributing them - looking at the photo now, I think mine is wrong - I don't see she's holding a branch, but more like the Palladium or a Victory or a caduceus... I think I need to look into this.


Hadrian Æ As
(c. 121-123 A.D.)
Rome Mint
[IMP CAESAR TRAIAN HADRIANVS AVG] laureate, draped and cuirassed bust right / [P]M [T]R P COS III, S C, Pax standing left, holding branch and cornucopiae.
RIC II, 3 676 (old RIC 616c).
(11.34 grams / 26 mm)
eBay Aug. 2018 Lot @ $0.25

To research something like this, I go to OCRE, search the emperor, and then anything that I can positively identify. As others have mentioned, that looks like Hadrian. Looking at yours, I narrowed it down to 16 possibilities (you can see what I searched for in the link - cornucopia, standing, etc.):

http://numismatics.org/ocre/results...ND+fulltext:cornucopia+AND+fulltext:HADRIANVS

Some of these are clearly not yours (two figures on the reverse, etc.). It then occurred to me that yours has CAESAR as part of the obverse inscription; this narrows it down to three:

http://numismatics.org/ocre/results...ia AND fulltext:HADRIANVS AND fulltext:CAESAR

Getting closer, maybe? Good luck.

 

Thanks for the help. I like these also because I have fun cleaning and identifying them. Inexpensive and very difficult to end up with something you can id and save.
I agree with your direction. I have found a few close. I will get some leads and get back to you. I think we are looking for the same coin.

 

I partially agree. I don't know, if the scratches reach the level of tooling. Maybe they do. Maybe they don't. Perhaps it depends, on one's definition of tooling. I've only been collecting ancients for 3 years, so I'm no expert.
The last high resolution photo in the OP, seems to show a lot of scratches, which are parallel to the edges of the legend/letters, and in between the letters. If someone was looking at that photo, someone who didn't know what was done to the coin, someone who is not an expert, then that person wouldn't know if the coin had been tooled and then re-patinated with an artificial patina, or if only the patina had been scratched. Perhaps an expert could tell, if the expert had the coin in hand, under a microscope or loupe.
Even if none of the base metal is removed, if the patina is selectively removed from the fields, and a similar amount of patina is not removed from the devices, then perhaps this could be called tooling, if it is extreme enough, depending on one's definition of tooling. If the patina is thick enough, then one could carve an entire design out of the patina, a design which is nothing like the original design, and that would be tooling, obviously.
However, it looks like @Inspector43 was trying to reveal the actual underlying design. And, it looks like @Inspector43 removed patina, from both the devices and the fields.
But, for such a thick patina, how does one know, where the edges of the devices are? And, how does one know, what the details of the devices are? How does one know, if one is correctly revealing the edges and details of the devices? How does one know, how much patina to remove, at each location on the coin?
In any case, cleaning marks/scratches are undesirable. Occasionally, I will see an ancient coin in an auction, in which "cleaning marks" is mentioned in the description in the listing, because the coin has a lot of scratches on it, which were created by the cleaning process that someone used.
However, I don't know, what professionals do, when they start with a coin, like the OP coin was originally, with a thick layer of blue/black patina, so thick that the design is almost completely hidden. It seems like, it would be desirable, to remove some of the blue/black patina, like @Inspector43 did, so that the underlying devices are revealed. But, one wouldn't want to remove all of the blue/black patina, because then one would have a stripped red coin.
But, how does a professional do it? Do they essentially do what @Inspector43 did, and then use a tiny buffing wheel to smooth out the cleaning scratches? Or, do they use a different tool, to scrape off the patina, a tool which doesn't leave cleaning scratches? Or, do they use a chemical treatment, rather than a mechanical process? I don't know.
And, how do they know, that they are revealing the actual details and edges of the underlying devices, versus creating edges and details that don't actually exist in the underlying metal?
Does anyone know the answers, to these questions?

 

@sand Thanks for the comments. These are good comments and good questions.

I've been collecting since 1948 and there isn't much left for me to collect. So, I got into Uncleaned Ancients a couple of years ago. Getting uncleaned coins that are virtually impossible to identify and then bringing them to correct attribution is my way of getting coins out of the wild.

I have cleaned and attributed more than 120. I try really hard not to doing any tooling or reach base metal. The subject coin will be smoothed (not tooling in my opinion) and protected. I feel that some of my coins I became too aggressive with, but most are in the acceptable range. And my coins are not being sold.

Every time I get comments like those in this post, I review what I am doing. Therefore, thanks again for the feedback.

Here are a couple of my finished products to give an idea of where I want my coins to end up.

 

There is only one fact about ancient coins: Everything is 'opinion'. When you go to sell a coin to someone else, you will need to find someone who shares your opinion about what happened to the coin since it was made and whether that disqualifies the coin as acceptable, desirable, valuable etc. If you plan to keep the coin forever and be buried with it, only your opinion matters. 99.99% of ancient coins are 'details' coins by modern standards rather like modern collectors consider metal detector finds. We all allow cleaning of surface dust and lightly adhered soil from ancients but when you start leaving marks like those scratches most of us have no interest in the coin unless it has some special value as a great rarity. In time, the surface of a coin corrodes so it is impossible to remove this 'patina' without exposing the metal that started under the surface no matter how it is done. The most important skill in cleaning coins is recognizing when it will be possible to improve a coin and when it would be better just to walk away. There are professionals who are very good at this. I am not one. Cleaning coins is a different hobby than collecting them. I do not find it at all enjoyable. There are a million coins out there. We each can decide which we want in our collections. I do not want the Hadrian. Below are five coins, all the same type and legend, that I considered worth having despite the fact than none are perfect and all have been cleaned to varying degrees. Only a few people here would want even one of them. I may be the only person who wants them all including the one on the right which was my first of the type. That is the hobby of ancient coins. If you must have perfect proofs, you will be happier collecting moderns.