I must admit that I'd hoped to show you something completely different. There were a number of coins I was interested in at an auction where I'd never participated. To be honest, I'd never been overly fond of the house due to a higher-than-average incidence of fakes, but these coins had a good provenance, so I trusted them. I swear I verified the auction start three times. I even searched for "13 hours from now" to verify it. The day of the auction I logged in two hours early just to make sure things were ready and I discovered...all of the coins I was interested in had been auctioned off. A number went for well below what I would have offered. They didn't even send an email that my place-holder bids were exceeded. Oh well. IMHO this is the auction house's loss - not mine. My wife wouldn't have been pleased by the expense, so it was probably for the best. Of course, the auction house could have made more money by starting when they said they would. Therefore, I'm going to show something different than that something that was different. I bought these two coins at the same time as my first Sestertius. Both are far from my core collection. I rarely buy Roman coins, let alone late Roman, but even though there probably isn't any coin more common than this one, I felt I had to have an example. It's just too cool. Imagine these days how many people you'd offend if you put the image of one guy killing another on a coin or bank note? Ex Marc Breitsprecher This next one is kind of in my core collection. The theory is if I create a "bridge" between the time of Alexander the Great and the Roman times, I can then display both on my web site (or more important - I can buy more Roman coins). I have coins from Ptolemy I and Ptolemy II, so Ptolemy III was the next logical choice. Of course, there are a lot of coins to go with a pricy Cleopatra at the end, and I'm not super-motivated to go after them so it'll probably be awhile. Still, I loved the portrait on this one, so I couldn't resist picking it up. The ancient Egyptians must have been very strong from lugging such chunky coins around. Ex Marc Breitsprecher Feel free to show off your "different" stuff.
I like your FTR. Well struck and very well centered, common or not, this is irrelevant. But anyway a FTR with these details, even if not a rarity, is not as common as one might think. My collection is not homogeneous (and I like it this way). I mainly collect Roman Imperial coins. Especially 1st-3rd century. This was my first area of interest when I started this journey. But I study and buy coins with equal pleasure from different areas - provincial, Republican and Greek. This coin is out of my normal area and I don't intend to buy more Parthian coins but I felt the need to add something "exotic". And by posting this newly acquired coin I got myself a homework to do. It was attributed as Vologases III but after doublechecking, that square beard indicates a group II coin from here, from a different ruler https://www.parthia.com/parthia_ident_drachm_square.htm#GroupII
I really cannot saw that I have many coins outside my core interests though I do have a small collection of Talers and some earlier North American dollar sized coins. However I do like those massive Ptolemaic Aes and have a few. Ptolemy II Ae Drachm 261-246 BC. Obv Head of Zeus Ammon right wearing horn of Ammon and taenia. Rv. Two eagles standing left wings folded. Below P Svoronos 497 CSE B 261 68.37 grms 40 mm Photo by W. Hansen This coin appears to be among the earliest of these gaint Ptolemaic cartwheels. Prior to this the largest ae coins were diobles which generally had a diameter of 28 grms. It is interesting that the Ptolemies chose to mint these massive ae coins when it would have been far easier to mint a much smaller coin and assign it an arbitrary value. If these coins are based on some reflection of the relative value between silver and copper in the Ptolemaic Empire, then it does bring into focus the entire question of the relative values of these two metals within the Mediterranean basin.
This does puzzle me. I can see people of that era questioning a bronze drachm, since those were overwhelmingly produced elsewhere in silver, but why did they make even obols and their variants so large? These were replaced with far more manageable copper coins elsewhere. My understanding is Egypt had no (or few) natural sources of silver, so I assume that's why they limited their use to the tets - and even those as I understand were produced from other tets and rarely from raw silver. Still, it's odd to me that they seemed to try to replicate the value of copper in the weight of the coin, vs just dictating it as you mention. That being said, I would have loved to see a copper tet. A gold stater equivalent could have killed someone...
Too bad about the auction, but it looks like you managed to get some very nice coins anyway! I do like the detail and style on that (Cyzicus mint?) Fallen Horseman. Coming from so many different mints, a lot of times the style is almost cartoonish in its depictions and proportions. Your celator got it right! Mine is from Antioch, one of the "good" mints IMO (and not just for FTR's): Also very nice detail on the Ptolemaic bronze! Even without the auction I'd say you won.
Britain's George III attempted something similar in 1797. Maybe that's why he's known as "mad"? https://en.numista.com/catalogue/pieces1287.html [edit] Then, of course, there's the aes grave as... https://cngcoins.com/Coin.aspx?CoinID=365535
That's a nice example of an FTR, @kirispupis. This EL trachy below is pretty far outside my usual hunting ground, but I wanted one Byzantine coin in my collection. They are not rare, and esthetically, you get a lot of coin for an affordable sum. I'm not usually a big fan of gold, but the warm hues of this electrum somehow won me over. Its iconography takes some studying, and many of its wonders probably still escape me. But, if nothing else, it has taught me what an akakia is. Ever since I read Gogol's novella 'The Overcoat' I had always wondered why the story's protagonist had such an outlandishly funny and strange name, Akakij Akakievitsj. I often wondered if there was a meaning behind it. Forty years later this Byzantine coin gave me the serendipitous answer to that question! An akakia, as it turns out, is a ceremonious roll held by the emperor and filled with dust to symbolize the mortal nature of all men. A memento mori of sorts. To a 19th-century Russian, being orthodox, its meaning probably would have been obvious. To me, an uninitiated 20th-century West-European reader, (and probably to most of us), it just sounded weird and funny. So it turns out that studying Byzantine coins can help you understand the speaking names of 19th-century Russian literature. Fitting for 'And Now for Something Completely Different'.
Admittedly, I've never read "The Overcoat", though I have an unread copy in Russian downstairs. I must admit that when I saw the name Akakij Akakievitsj, I thought of "какать", which means something completely different. I have a feeling your interpretation is the correct one. Gorgeous coin. I've been tempted at a trachy myself, but I've resolved to not let a coin with Christian iconography be my first gold coin.
That interpretation is waaaay off... Gogol' is not for beginners. It took me two years of full-time study before I could get through it in Russian without hitches. Since you have a Russian copy, do you speak it?
I do, but I would need a lot more practice to tackle a novel. I minored in Russian in college and my wife speaks it. For a pickup line I recited "Я помню чудное мгновенье..." and it worked. She's adamant to others that she's not Russian, but is from Tajikistan - except Americans then think she's a terrorist, so she now says "Central Asia." Most of her family has difficulties in English, so I speak Russian with them. I have a small library of ~20 books in Russian I gathered when I was younger - Tolstoi, Dostoevksy, Bulgakov, Pushkin, Checkov, Turgenev, etc. I've read few of them and haven't picked up a Russian novel in years, but I don't want to get rid of them since they're all difficult to replace.
