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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;lrbguy, post: 3557122, member: 88829&quot;]This train wreck is important to me but is no great howling rarity and is not actually one that I would normally collect.&nbsp; It is an AE24 Roman Provincial of Titus from Judean Ascalon.&nbsp; The obverse bears his portrait left with the abbreviation CEB descending left; the reverse has the city goddess standing left with ASKELO (in Greek) in left field, and DNG (in Greek low to the right) indicating year 80-81. The seller was a long experienced dealer but could not find it in any of the standard references back when I bought it, in late 1987.&nbsp; I never tried to follow up on it.</p><p>[ATTACH=full]945650[/ATTACH] </p><p>So why did I buy it if it it didn&#039;t fit in with anything.&nbsp; Part of the reason is that I was still in the early stages of collecting and had left open any possibility for a direction to go.&nbsp; But the main reason I wanted it had little to do with the collection I was forming.</p><p>&nbsp;</p><p>In the summer of 1987 I spent six weeks in Israel on an archaeological excavation as a volunteer under the auspices of the University of Chicago.&nbsp; The dig was year two of the Leon-Levy Expedition directed by Prof Lawrence Stager (then at Chicago but soon after, Harvard) and located in the Israeli National Park in Ashkelon.&nbsp; I had bought numerous antiquities while in Israel, but none from Ashkelon and no coins.&nbsp; So when I got back I started looking for something to connect with the time on the dig.&nbsp; The squares in which I had worked had been digging in Late Bronze in one and Iron II in another, and from them I had some sherds the director let me keep, but nothing recognizable that really said &quot;Ashkelon.&quot;&nbsp; So when I got back I found a coin dealer who had some inexpensive pieces like this one.&nbsp; For less than $30 I got a lifetime memory piece that puts me back there to this day.&nbsp; Sometimes its all about time and place.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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