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Message:: [QUOTE="Ardatirion, post: 1692018, member: 9204"]I also think this is fake, but not for the same knee-jerk reasons you all do. The first thing I did was look at the seller's other offerings, which had two perfectly reasonable Seleukid drachms. I find it odd that someone would knowingly sell a fake in the company of those two. Combine that with the fact that the surfaces are very good (despite what people see as casting bubbles or a bronze core, all of which are imagined), I had a feeling that this just *might* be real. So I next turned to Coinarchives to see if I could find a die match. I thought I had a rev. die match from a recent Roma sale. And then I saw the Gillet specimen (Leu 88, lot 71) and my heart nearly stopped. It looked like both dies matched! But then I looked again, the tail on the obverse lion swooped, rather than continuing fairly straight. A letter on the obverse didn't quite line up. If not the same dies, these are either by the same engraver (the Demareteion master), or a very good, die-struck fake inspired by him. Then we have the flan cracks. All of the other examples of this issue have perfectly smooth edges. It is evident that some care was taken during striking. But this one has an edge riddled with splits, a flaw that usually happens if a flan was not sufficiently heated prior to striking. Again, none of the others exhibit this except, admittedly, the aforementioned Gillet specimen, which does not have as many or as pronounced flaws. In conclusion, I feel this is an extremely high quality counterfeit that the forger inadvertently struck at the wrong temperature, but from well-engraved fake dies directly inspired by the Demareteion master. The seller's story is quite possibly true. He may very well have acquired an old collection at a garage sale at stupidly low prices, of which this fake was originally a part.[/QUOTE]

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