Challenge "Box of 20" Ancient Coins

I literally have my current 'box of 20' on my lap right now.
Its getting increasingly difficult to see which pieces I'd displace from this group as new purchases come in.

 

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Nice coin! Very numismatic. If I had to say where my interest in ancients began, where I walked through the threshold and entered, it would be the coins of Cyrene. So, your Libyan casts light on that.

But it is curious to me that you claim not to be a numismatist, yet have a passion for history. Your Libyan is exactly the kind of coin a collector would pass over. It has none of the fine luster, deep strike, and so-called "fine style" that collectors pay for. To a numismatist, however, your Libyan not only speaks, but begs more research, further clarification, deeper insight and wider outlook. You seem to appreciate that.

 

It is a gorgeous coin, but it is the Libyan / Mercenary War and the placemarker in History that it is that interests me.

Strike, centering, mint, variations, unique devices, grade, luster, etc, etc is not as important to me. My intent is not to sell them, or collect by coins being of a special grade or highr, etc. I feel that the third party grading and slabbers have carved too large a niche and have commercialized and sterilized the Hobby. The numismatic grading systems have moved collecting from being a Hobby, to being an investment. I am amazed at how many times people ask “what its grade, and how much isit worth???” This shifr in coin collecting’s center-of-gravity is WHY I no longer collect Moderns (as of 30 years ago when that crap started,) to my collecting Historicall of Ancient coins.

That this coin represents a brutal, and almost lost, chapter in human history is what interests me.

Folks may know of the First Punic War, but they may not understand its aftermath of the huge indemnites that Rome imposed on Carthage. However, they may not be aware that becaues of those indemnities, that there was the direct effect of not having the monies to pay their massive Mercenary Army. This resulted in a continued, and very brutal Mercenary War immediately after the First Punic War. Carthage literally was at war with their own miltary, and lost many of their own people. It reflected some horrible atrocities in Human History, until it was put down by a Barcid. This was a further hatred of Rome by the Barcid family, that later manifested itself with the Second Punic War, or also called The War with Hannibal... who was from the family Barcid.


It is the same reason I love coins of the Marsic Confedeation, another rather overlooked chapter in Human History. The Roman LOST the War by conceding EVERY demand of the Italians, but won the war militarily. This was a critical juncture in Roman and Human History, again overlooked.

The Social War, Marsic Confederation
AR Denarius. Corfinium, 89 BCE. 3.60g, 20mm, 8h.
Obv: Laureate head of Italia right, wearing pearl necklace; ITALIA behind, X (mark of value) below chin
Rev: Italia, seated left on shields, holding sceptre in right hand and sword in left, being crowned with wreath by Victory who stands behind; retrograde inverted B in exergue.
Ref: Campana 105 (same obverse die); Sear 228 w/ control mark inverted B; HN Italy 412a.
Near Very Fine. Cleaning marks to rev.
Ex: Roma

 

Well, Doug, I am sort of taken aback. I mean, it is a challenge, like "Show Us Your Barbarous Radiates" not that those are the only coins that ever could matter.

Just to offer some context, you cannot bring 10,000 coins to a club meeting and spend 10,000 hours telling everything you know about them. Take my Julian II. I gave it a passing entry and said nothing more. You and I and most others here know the history (or can find it easily enough if they care). We try not to step on toes here lest GDSTMP will weigh in, but one reason that Flavius Claudius Julianus wanted to restore pagan worship was to put an end to roving mobs of Christians killing each other in the streets over dogma. So, for me he stands in for the entire line of Constantines who were integral to that chaos. And that is a story that I can tell at a club meeting -- if I wanted to make everyone angry at me...

As for the coin itself, I bought it in 2007 from Newgate and attitributed it as an AE1 D N FL CL IVLIANVS P F AVG / Bull right, two stars above, SECVRITAS REPVB above, NIKE (mint Nikeopolis) in exergue. However, now, it gets a somewhat different identification. My coin is 25 mm and 9.1 grams. But Washington Galleries called their 27mm, 7.42 grams a "double maiorina" and VA identified their 8.18 grammer as a "Double Centenionalis." Those are attempts at fiduciary identifications with meanings in macro-economics. Maybe we know more now than we did in 2007, or maybe not...

 

Whence the name of BARCELONA in Spain, a former Carthaginian colony whose Punic roots grew deep and flowered with the arrivals later of Jews ("Sephardics" today) and then the Muslims. The same light sheds some understanding on why the so-called "French" of "Marseille" enjoy bouillabaisse, which is just mixed fish stew, a Greek dish, because the town was called "Massalia" when it was first colonized in 600 BCE by Greeks from the town of Phocaea in what is today called "Turkey."

To me that all explains why you are a numismatist and not a collector. Collectors know very little about history. But with ancients, if you do not know the history, you have nothing.

 

Will not argue that, if indeed, that is the definition.

However, knew and understood the Histories before I captured the coins that represent placemarkers in History.

Coins represent my touch to those Histories.

 

- In the PCGS set registry, a US typeset is 137 coins.

- "Every basic classic U.S. coin in Circulation Strike from 1792 through 1964, every date and every Mintmark" requires 2821 coins.

- Add in major varieties and it is 3260 coins.

- For the overachievers, add in proof, every major variety, every date and it requires 6269 coins.

The "Red Book" has some additional coins (colonials, moderns, etc), bringing that to roughly 8000 or so (although I've seen some higher estimates for how many coins are in the book).

A high level taxonomy of ancients is in the process of being built by a couple different organizations. Their level of granularity is roughly by denomination + ruler and, as an example, lumps any Brutus denarius together with the Eid Mar, let alone trying to pull apart die varieties and styles. That database is around 8,000 major types.

Going down to the same level of detail as US would bring the count at least into the hundreds of thousands if not millions.

There are a couple high end collectors focusing on Greek coinage right now trying to get as many of the major varieties as possible. They're expecting to need somewhere around 80,000 coins to complete the set but, while the volume of purchases would decrease over time as the major types are crossed off, it would take many, many lifetimes to try to own one of everything (and it still wouldn't be possible).

Happily, this means we can all collect whichever way we choose as not even the goddess Moneta could own them all.

 

I have to agree with Ancient Joe that a complete set of all the major varieties ancient Greek coins would be a massive undertaking and probably a futile one as well. The simple problem is that some coins do not show up more than once or twice a century. This problem is not restricted to just the more glamorous coins but some rather innocuous coins as well. When I got started buying Greek coins I bought a trihemiobol from a small time dealer. I cannot remember ever seeing the same type again for the last 27 years.