I am out of my element with ancients. Way back in April the Preacher at my church requested my help identifying a handful of various oldies. You guys & gals came through and IDed all of them. It seems I might have opened Pandora's box. My Pastor friend came to me today with 2 lbs. of ancients in a tupperware container, floating in olive oil !! We dried off some and attempted to show some markings for possible identification. Any help would be appreciated with these six specimens. Thanks. Coin #1 Coin #2 Coin #3 Coin #4 Coin #5 (Reverse very corroded) Coin #6 (Reverse very corroded)
My quick-and-dirty, gut-level IDs (take with a grain of salt): 1. Either Valentinian I (364-375) or his son Valentinian II (375-392), I think Val.II is more likely. Reverse is "Virtus exerciti" (strength of the army), mint of Antioch. 2. Probably Augustus (27 BCE- 14 CE). 3. Augustus, commemorative struck posthumously by Tiberius (14-37). Reverse shows an altar. 4. Looks like a coin? My gut says the portrait is Trajan (98-117). 5. Doesn't look like any Roman emperor. Probably a deity (Jupiter/Zeus?) on the reverse of a locally-issued coin (many cities in the Roman Empire, especially in the East, retained the right to strike their own bronze coins well into the third century CE). 6. That distinctive portrait, and especially the weird nose, can only be Nerva (96-98). Sounds like an interesting little collection your pastor has. Please post any other coins for ID, this is fun.
Coin #1 : Valentinian II, not I ! Coin #2 : Augustus, as, Rome mint, 11-12 AD (RIC 471) Coin #3 : like @Parthicus said Coin #4 : coin minted at Antioch (Syria), "SC series". Trajan? Coin #5 : no clue Coin #6 : dupondius of Nerva.
@Parthicus and @GinoLR : Thank You very much good sirs. I emailed my Pastor your conclusions about the coins I posted. He was extremely happy and very impressed with your findings. Slowly but surely I will attempt to clean others that I feel will produce markings to identify them. It will be an ongoing endeavor, though. Quite a few are "fused together" and I have broken 4 trying to separate individual pieces. The cloth bag was reminiscent of burlap and is now long gone. The remaining lump of coins was hardened. I'm the one who told my friend to soak them in olive oil. He has been doing so for a month, before presenting this treasure. We have no idea when they were placed in the ground. As they are various denominations from varied time frames and possibly many empires, we haven't a clue when or by whom they were amassed. I did learn the "back history" concerning this lot: This man's father was with the 86th Mtn. Infantry Div. during WW2. He participated in an assault of a place called Riva Ridge and a battle of Mt. Belvedere (Belvedere Marittimo Italy, near the Southern coast). When digging a foxhole the soldier struck what he thought was a rock. It was a deteriorated cloth sack filled with coins and hardened dirt. Thinking to investigate at a latter date, he placed it in his gas mask bag. He brought this lump home as a curiosity from the war and left it in his garage. After his father passed away my Preacher recovered it and has held it since. Again, many thanks for your expertise concerning this trove. I will, as time permits, continue to uncover the past with your help. I think we'll call it the "Preacher's Hoard" for now.
Wow, what a cool story! A miniature hoard all its own. I hope you continue to post your findings here.
I have since cleaned to some extent 18 more from this batch. I don't want to inundate the forum all at once so I'll probably show a half dozen or so once a week. I have convinced my Pastor friend to purchase some 2x2s and construct a binder for the ones that have already have some identification established from CT members. Thanks for looking.
The story of the finding is interesting, but I don't think it was an ancient hoard. If the guy could recognize a "deteriorated cloth sack", the cloth could not be ancient, maybe a few decades. The coins it contained cover an very large time range, almost 4 centuries from Augustus to Valentinian II at least (probably even more, on the picture of the coin pile it seems there is also a Byzantine I+B of Alexandria, but I'm not sure). This mix of bronze coins from Rome, Antioch, etc. belonging to different centuries and coinage systems never circulated together, especially in Italy. This looks more like a modern 19th or 20th c. collection of worn ancient coins.
