My show today produced the usual group of coins that I like and some of you may but tonight I will only show the extremes. First is the most expensive coin I bought but I must have got a bargain because I easily found an online listing for this exact specimen selling in 2013 for over $100 more than I paid. This is the fourth time I have found a new coin of mine listed as having been sold by this particular dealer for more than I paid so I assume that his practice is to list unsold coins as having sold and then wholesaling them off to small dealers from whom I buy them. I see nothing wrong with the coin but I would not have bid on it in a sale where it was hyped as aEF (see the scratches - they showed in the 2013 photo, too). It is a nice example of the coin but why do we have to call everything EF? As far as listing coins that don't sell as sold so you can make it look like you are a hotshot dealer .... lets just say it does not make me want to deal with him. Eukratides , Baktria, 170-155 BC AE hemiobol Dioscuri riding Cheapest and worst today is a coin the seller could not ID but I could so I bought it cheap (or only slightly more than something this ugly is worth). Ordinarily I would tell you the ID but it is an Alexandrian tetradrachm so I will post it here and ask JA to practice using his new Emmett book to ID it. Sure it is missing some legend but it has all the letters needed to get the name right even if you don't have the book. I would appreciate anyone owning a nicer one to post it here for comparison. Others who like ID challenges are welcome to try this one, too, but I will be out most of tomorrow so I won't be available to answer questions. I know when I bought it that it was not worth anything in the market but sometimes you just enjoy throwing money to the wind. I wonder if it could be cleaned or tooled to look better??? If the rest of the coin was as nice as the portrait, this thing would be very desirable. As it is....????
Very nice indo-greek ! Your spelling of the name just strikes me as odd. Usually it is spelled as Eukratides ? The surfaces are much better than many of these i have seen come by To complement yours here is an AR obol (10 mm, 0.8 gr) of the same ruler. This shows just the caps of the Dioscuri on the reverse:
Congrats on your new additions (both are quite cool) I always like the looks of the Alexandrian tetradrachms (they're chunky and gnarly lil' fellas) ... sadly, I can't decipher the legend, so I can't come-up big an score a desperately needed bonus point (*sigh*) I do have a couple of recently purchased Baktrian babies ... Baktria Indo-Greek, Antialkidas Nikephoros 130-120 BC Fourre, Baktria, Indo-Greek, Hermaios 105-90 BC I want to see more of your sweet birthday booty => please keep 'em coming!!
I don't have a Roman Egyptian tetradrachm of this emperor to show for comparison nor do I see any with this reverse in various archives. In case others wish to work out the attribution, I won't post it and spoil the fun. Emmett's rarity rating for the OP coin is R5. As we've seen, sometimes "book rare" coins can be somewhat easily found in the market and sometimes "common" coins are difficult to find. This tetradrachm's book rating seems to match market reality. The condition is unfortunate but I've certainly bought worse .
Yes, but you have better taste than to show them. This is the sort of coin that is more a reference item than a collectible. I would have been upset if I had got home and found a dozen of them online. Do you know how Emmett worked out his 'book rare' numbers?
From his book's preface: "The purpose of this book is to compile a list of the Alexandrian coins in all of the available published collections and auction catalogs, and to assign an approximated rarity for each one. This book does not list all of the Alexandrian coins extant, as there are a number of important collections that have not been published and a few early Alexandrian coin collection books could not be located. However, the unpublished Alexandrian coins from the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM) and the American Numismatic Society (ANS) are included in this book-- although confirmation of individual coins in these two collections will have to wait until the collections are properly published." Page xvii: "A coin assigned a rarity value of 5 would likely be found only in one or two of the published major Alexandrian collections..." etc Pages 264 through 269 list those sources. The auctions do not include every auction prior to the book's publication but I suspect they were auctions which included more Alexandrians than most. It seems popular to sell groups of undescribed or incompletely imaged Alexandrian tetradrachms, especially from the later emperors, so that probably skews the data since there wouldn't be a way to accurately include those coins in the data.
I recently captured an Eukratides... my first Baktrian. Is this one acceptable? I like the Dioskouroi... BAKTRIA, Greco-Baktrian Kingdom Eukratides I Megas, Ca. 170-145 BCE Æ Hemioble Quadruple Unit (22 mm, 7.66 g, 12h) Obv: Diademed and draped bust right Rev: The Dioskouroi, holding palm fronds and spears, on horses rearing right Ref: Bopearachchi type 19; SNG ANS 551
I don't have Emmett, nor do I know much about Alexandrian tetradrachms(though I did recently buy my first one) but I'd like to take a crack at it. Rather than spoil the fun and list it out in the open, I'll simply leave a link to my answer which others can choose to click or not. I believe this is your coin. While you're right that it doesn't have a lot of market value, I think it's a pretty appealing coin with a really fantastic portrait(but what do I know, I buy and share a lot of really scrappy Republican bronzes myself). Also, I might as well share my first Alexandrian tet, of a different emperor but not too far away on the timeline: Roman Provincial, Alexandria, Claudius II Gothicus, Potin tetradrachm(21mm, 10.5g, 12h), 268 AD. AVT K KΛAVΔIOC CEB; Laureate, draped, bust right / Eagle standing right, head left, holding wreath; in right field, LA (year 1). Emmett 3878; Curtis 1670; Milne 4202. Ex. JBGood collection
