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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;dougsmit, post: 1802534, member: 19463&quot;]Sorry I missed your article but I had given up on the Celator by 2004.&nbsp; I certainly agree with the statement on only having likelihoods.&nbsp; It has been fashionable lately to deny the Emergency coins altogether as opposed to the old school recognition that 99% of fourree owls came from counterfeiters working before and after 406 BC.&nbsp; Dealers in coins discovered that they could sell a piece of trash for several times its value if they attached it to the story of the Emergency.&nbsp; I have seen no more than a handful of coins that I believe had even a remote chance of being from 406 and the placement of those is entirely by style.&nbsp; Svoronos plate 15 shows 7 tets and 9 drachms coded as &#039;subaer&#039; all of which have the same style appropriate for that date.&nbsp;&nbsp; I have not seen the neighsayers address these coins specifically.&nbsp;&nbsp; I would suspect that the number of coins of the Emergency was small and there was some effort to remove them in the 30 years before the currency law so I doubt that it would have struck the authorities as necessary to distinguish between the &#039;real&#039; fakes and the fake fakes by that time.&nbsp; Of course this is just a guess based on my reading of the likelihoods.&nbsp; Showing 10,000 fake fourrees does absolutely nothing in the way of proving that there never were any real Emergency coins.&nbsp;&nbsp; The fact that some people use this argument tends to make me discount everything they say on the subject.&nbsp;&nbsp; </p><p><br /></p><p>A question I would like to see addressed but that will never be proven is whether the official testers might be responsible for the huge number of test cut coins where the cut is placed only on the face of the owl and whether these cuts are more or less likely to be found on coins of foreign manufacture than on those believed to be actual Athens mint products.&nbsp; Any such evidence will be far from certain fact if there is anything that is certain when it comes to ancient numismatics.&nbsp;&nbsp; Primary references on coins other than the coins themselves are nearly non-existent and hints like the mentions of coins here and there in comedies are never accepted at face value by all modern scholars.&nbsp; This is not a field for those who require 101% certainty on all details.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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