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<p>[QUOTE="lehmansterms, post: 3650867, member: 80804"]We all wish there was a simpler, more clear-cut answer to your question, but the ability to sense authenticity from photos or at a glance is a skill developed pretty much only by long experience with both genuine coins and modern copies.</p><p>Some pointers for things you can check which do not require long familiarity - </p><p>Do the coins respond to a magnet? If they're genuine, they're silver about as pure as was technically able to be refined at the time so the presence of any magnetic elements in the alloy is a major red flag raised against authenticity (Chinese fakes, particularly, are known for being magnetic although they appear to be silver.) </p><p>What is the exact weight of each piece? - again, the technology of the era might not have been able to weigh consistently down to 1/100 of a gram, but to be authentic (unless there are signs of material having been removed) pieces varying by a significant fraction of a gram from the average weight of genuine specimens become questionable. It's really important to be able to weigh coins - fakers seldom-to-never get the weights right, especially on ancient coins - so it's worth your while to acquire a scale accurate to + or - 0.01 g. Nowadays they're available for only a few dollars as pocket jewelry scales, etc. On paper, the Attic tetradrachm should weigh 17.2 g - the coins themselves will typically be around 16.4-17.0 g</p><p>Die matches - these were struck in astronomical numbers. The chances that you will have exact die matches in a lot of a couple dozen apparently circulated coins are vanishingly small, so if you can tell that there are die matches, that's a pretty solid indicator that you need to look more closely.</p><p>I am copying the link to a site which has a very detailed system for attempting to rate the likelihood that any given piece is authentic vs modern. The original is in Spanish, but it has been run through google translate, etc, so the syntax is a bit tortured - however it should give you an outline of the sorts of indicators we look for in determining authentic vs copy.</p><p><a href="https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=es&tl=en&u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.tesorillo.com%2Fotras%2Ffalsas.htm" target="_blank" class="externalLink ProxyLink" data-proxy-href="https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=es&tl=en&u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.tesorillo.com%2Fotras%2Ffalsas.htm" rel="nofollow">https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=es&tl=en&u=https://www.tesorillo.com/otras/falsas.htm</a>[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>
[QUOTE="lehmansterms, post: 3650867, member: 80804"]We all wish there was a simpler, more clear-cut answer to your question, but the ability to sense authenticity from photos or at a glance is a skill developed pretty much only by long experience with both genuine coins and modern copies. Some pointers for things you can check which do not require long familiarity - Do the coins respond to a magnet? If they're genuine, they're silver about as pure as was technically able to be refined at the time so the presence of any magnetic elements in the alloy is a major red flag raised against authenticity (Chinese fakes, particularly, are known for being magnetic although they appear to be silver.) What is the exact weight of each piece? - again, the technology of the era might not have been able to weigh consistently down to 1/100 of a gram, but to be authentic (unless there are signs of material having been removed) pieces varying by a significant fraction of a gram from the average weight of genuine specimens become questionable. It's really important to be able to weigh coins - fakers seldom-to-never get the weights right, especially on ancient coins - so it's worth your while to acquire a scale accurate to + or - 0.01 g. Nowadays they're available for only a few dollars as pocket jewelry scales, etc. On paper, the Attic tetradrachm should weigh 17.2 g - the coins themselves will typically be around 16.4-17.0 g Die matches - these were struck in astronomical numbers. The chances that you will have exact die matches in a lot of a couple dozen apparently circulated coins are vanishingly small, so if you can tell that there are die matches, that's a pretty solid indicator that you need to look more closely. I am copying the link to a site which has a very detailed system for attempting to rate the likelihood that any given piece is authentic vs modern. The original is in Spanish, but it has been run through google translate, etc, so the syntax is a bit tortured - however it should give you an outline of the sorts of indicators we look for in determining authentic vs copy. [URL]https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=es&tl=en&u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.tesorillo.com%2Fotras%2Ffalsas.htm[/URL][/QUOTE]
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