Message:

<p>[QUOTE=&quot;TIF, post: 3061308, member: 56859&quot;]There already <i>are</i> indicators and they are less crude than a TPG slabbed count would bring.&nbsp; There are various paid and free archives of ancient coins so anyone can extract information for any given type of coin if they are sufficiently motivated and have a TON of time to devote to the effort.&nbsp; How details are handled is another obstacle.&nbsp; With modern coins it&#039;s easy-- country, coin, year.&nbsp; It&#039;s not so tidy with ancient coins because of the vast number of variables.&nbsp; Jyrki Muona has been working on a die study (think of it as a sophisticated census) for Otho alone for a couple of decades and Otho has fewer coin types than most other emperors.&nbsp; I can&#039;t imagine the man hours it must take to do such a study.</p><p><br /></p><p>The percent of ancient coins slabbed is small so a TPG record of coins slabbed&nbsp; won&#039;t provide the type of counts you seek, plus due to lack of space the label information is rudimentary and may not be sufficient for census purposes.</p><p><br /></p><p>Also, as Doug pointed out, there is no way to account for the multitude of ancient coins languishing in old private collections and in museum basements and who knows what tomorrow&#039;s ground clearing and metal detecting may bring.</p><p><br /></p><p>To me, availability or lack of availability in today&#039;s market is the practical indicator of rarity.&nbsp; If rarity matters to you, before buying a coin, check all of the auction databases you can for recent sales (ACsearch; CNG&#039;s archives; CoinArchives); check for current &quot;retail&quot; offerings on&nbsp; Vcoins, MA-shops, eBay, etc; check Numisbids, Sixbid, and other auction aggregators for currently up-for-auction listings.&nbsp; &nbsp; For instance, at the moment there are 21 coins of Otho up for auction (not counting eBay) and 25 for sale on Vcoins.&nbsp; Most are denarii and the rest are provincials.&nbsp; I did not examine all of the denarii to see the exact types (there are ~9 basic reverses for Otho denarii, I think).[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

Your name or email address:

Do you already have an account?

• No, create an account now.
• Yes, my password is:
• Forgot your password?

Stay logged in