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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;red_spork, post: 2858000, member: 74282&quot;]I am not a collector of these types and as such cannot and will not present an opinion on the authenticity of the ones shown, but I will give you some tips on my own thought process in this case. This group appears to be at least a portion of a hoard, or at least someone is trying to make it look like that. When I&#039;m presented with such a group or even a single coin I believe the first step is simply comparing the style with published examples which I know to be authentic, principally those with a known hoard provenance. You can find plenty of hoard reports for hoards found in various places across the Mediterranean on JSTOR and I suggest you take a look as there are many new-style owl hoards out there. If you don&#039;t have JSTOR access, ask around and you can probably find a way. I graduated a few years ago and found that I still have access through my University and failing that I know a few people either in school as students or professors who don&#039;t mind fetching the occasional PDF for me.</p><p><br /></p><p>Secondly, I like to compare dies and try to figure out the number represented in the group I&#039;m looking at and once again compare to known good coins and compare what I see with the hoards I find. This takes a good eye and with such a large issue as new-style owls you may not find a die match outside the hoard but perhaps the ratio of the number of dies identified to the number of coins will lead to some insight. If all are from the same die pair it might be reason to be suspicious unless you can think of a good reason for that. You might also compare with dies of examples that have recently come to market - if you find that a particular die represented in the hoard has had 20 examples sold in the past 6 months, that too may be suspicious or it may be OK, there&#039;s really no hard and fast rule here and I have no idea how many dies were used to strike this series and how common it is to find matches.</p><p><br /></p><p>These are the sort of questions you need to learn to think through when presented with coins like this and trying to do due diligence on them. Depending on the type of coin, the source and the amount of money involved some purchases warrant more or less due diligence than others and even with seemingly good sources like big name dealers and collectors it&#039;s always good to be able to check their work, so to speak.&nbsp; Good luck.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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