First - sorry if this was discussed, couldn't find a similar topic. If it wasn't - what made you say, OK, starting today I want ancient coins? I started collecting modern coins and banknotes in 2013. In fact, restarted, as I collected in my childhood and found my old collection - and decided to give it a try. I went to numismatic fairs in my city, kept adding to my collection, and once there was an old man who showed me "something I've never seen before". And there they were, 2 small coins I immediately bought. I knew nothing about ancient coins, but I posted them on a forum and I found they were a Valens and a Julian II. Not the best condition (but just checked them now, not totally junk either). I found the old guy after this again, a few times and bought a few more, but in worse conditions, including something I suspect is an As from Antoninus Pius but in the worst shape you could think of. I forgot about ancient coins as I concentrated on my main collection and a few months ago I was starting to get bored, I have completed my "task" in modern area and I have almost all I wanted, the ones that are still missing are way too expensive. But something was missing when I quit. So here I was, registered on some auctions and started buying what I found attractive and in my budget. Without knowing too much, I had the surprise to get some good coins at quite low prices. Started reading all the resources I found, got some catalogs and I am trying to learn something new every day. From this forum as well. A good part is that I am not very exigent about the quality (however, the rule I have is never buy a coin if it cannot be identified due to wear). But a denarius from, let's say, Vespasianus, in Fine condition, almost all the legend visible and easy to be identified?? I'm in. I like history and I think coins are the best testimony for it. In a way we are studying history while collecting. Perhaps this is just the beginner's rush, but I see a story, even in common coins and I am still amazed about the art and craftsmanship people had MANY centuries ago. So I think I will stick around, since there is a lot to choose from.
ah, kool story ambrOzie....yeah, ancients is a wide open field full of rabbit holes that are interconnected...i guess the love of history and being able to get ancients(i live an a very rural area) got me started ...but my 1st 'collected coin' was this one...and it let me here on a great path that continues over the horizon.....many of us here collect other stuff too(coins +)...i just recently completed coins of the Austrian Habsburg HRE's
From a high level view, I think I enjoy ancient coin collecting because I like caretaking for things that existed for thousands of years before I was born and will continue existing after I’m gone. I’m young but I know I won’t have kids so part of me probably views this as my contribution to society after I’m gone. As to why I specifically collect the coins I do: I love Roman history, and the coins are my way of connecting with history. Seeing the faces of emperors and empresses humanizes them. The craftsmanship reminds us these people weren’t so dissimilar from you and me. They weren’t some “ancient” people, they’re us!
I got into this hobby back in February, and like most things in life, it was unplanned. I have the collecting bug since childhood (it started with comics) and while I was growing up it kept evolving to more serious stuff. For the past few years my main interest has been old swords (Japanese). Back then I attended a special event with my sword club where we got to study and examine some blades that are not on display, at the British Museum in London. It was a weekday, and on the way out I got the chance to visit a couple of the ancient coin shops that are located across the street. I was aware of these shops, but the few times I visited the museum before was always on weekends, and they were always closed. One of the shops I visited was Coincraft and I spent quite a bit of time there looking at coins. I was surprised that you can actually buy ancient coins for an affordable price. At a moment's inspiration I decided that I wasn't going to leave empty-handed. I knew this was an old and reputable shop, so I felt it was a safe place to get a coin. I decided to go for a higher end one, thinking that would be the only coin I would ever own. I ended up with an Alexander the Great Tetradrachm. After I got home I started researching the coin and I was hooked! Looking back now, I don't regret it a bit. And another bonus is that I got interested into reading about history again. I still collect comics by the way. Mostly EC Horror and Carl Barks duck comics from the 40s & 50s.
One day I took a tour round the British Museum's Money Gallery. At the end of the tour the Museum representative asked if we would like to handle some coins. One of those was an Alexander drachm. The sense of excitement that I felt at handling something that would have been handled by Greeks a hundred generations before me fuelled a desire to own some coins of my own. That was what started it for me - like Restitutor I have always had a love of ancient history but until speaking to the Museum staff I had absolutely no idea that ancient coins were so common and collectable. It's that tangible connection with the past that thrills me, the knowledge that these coins would have been used by real people to buy real goods and services 2,000 years ago.
I have always been a collector of something - stamps, magazines, American coins, etc. But I lost interest in each of these. In the late ‘70’s I got married in St. Thomas, USVI. Big mistake, but that’s another story for another time. While there, I went to Cardow Jewelers and saw a large display of ancient coins, each packaged in a lovely little padded box with a small typewritten description. And they were inexpensive! I bought a bronze sestertius of Vespasian for just a few dollars. When I got home I just kind of tucked it away. About 4 years later, I came across the coin as I was doing a little housekeeping. I thought, “This is pretty interesting that something this old is also inexpensive. That must mean there a lot of them available”. So my next step was to buy some books to learn more about the coins. I started with David Sear’s books on both Greek and Roman coins. I decided I’d start out with Greek coins due to their artistry. I was quickly overwhelmed with all of the options and realized I should narrow my focus. I remembered that when I started researching ancients, the one coin that really caused a visceral reaction for me was the EID MAR of Brutus. I was amazed that an act of such massive historical significance was not just memorialized in a coin, but that the coin was the product of one of the perpetrators himself! After reading more about the Imperatorial period and the personalities involved, I was hooked! It was early in the 1980’s and I decided to only collect coins from that period of Roman history. I have never sold any of my coins and probably never will. Sometimes I would go several years without any new additions, but the collection gives me tremendous satisfaction.
As a child whose parents were divorced in 1953, I spent a lot of time alone at home ('latchkey kid') while my mother worked. Sometimes, to keep me occupied, she loaned me money to buy a bag of coins from a local vending machine servicer which I would sort and roll after removing ones I needed or could sell at a local coin store. I never paid more than face value for a coin but I would trade in a better date one I had as a duplicate for ones I lacked. One day I noticed that the store had a dish of Romans on the counter. They were 50 cents for AR and $2 for denarii. I stopped trading for dates I lacked and started buying Romans. When I was in high school and got a job, I bought more and stopped searching vending machine coins. In 1974 when my daughter was born, I sold my ancients except for three that were special to me. Financially, that was a big mistake. To this day I wonder what ever happened to the coins I sold. Some I would recognize from foil pressings I made back then. I got back into it in the mid 1980's when I was making enough more to support a hobby.
For me, it was a realization best summed up in the words of that great Classicist of our times, Iggy Pop: "I feel a great comfort and relief knowing that there were others who lived and died and thought and fought so long ago; I feel less tyrannized by the present day. I learn much about the way our society really works, because the system-origins - military, religious, political, colonial, agricultural, financial - are all there to be scrutinized in their infancy. I have gained perspective. I find out how little I know. I urge anyone who wants life on earth to really come alive for them to enjoy the beautiful ancestral ancient world." That, and of course, all the cool coinz. JULIUS CAESAR AR Denarius. 3.77g, 19mm. Rome mint, struck by L. Aemilius Buca, February - March 44 BC. Crawford 480/8; Sydenham 1061; RCV 1411. O: CAESAR DICT PERPETVO , wreathed head of Caesar facing right. R: L BVCA , Venus standing left, holding Victory and a sceptre. Ex David Sellwood Collection; ex Seaby Coin & Medal Bulletin (1 Oct 1977), lot 793
I was always into World coinage, since I was 11. I got a auction catalogue in the mail from NFA in 1985. I eagerly glossed thru it and was hooked ever since. My first ancient was a AV MS Histamenon from Constantine X. It cost me $250US.
For me, it was creating an account here on Cointalk early last year. I've been collecting coins with varying levels of seriousness ever since I was in Elementary School. I started collecting coins much more seriously in 2013 when my grandparents gifted me an ANA membership, and when I became active in my local coin club. Since then, I began collecting world coins in 2015, starting with the coinage of Great Britain and their empire. When it came to ancient coins, I can attribute two factors for what caused me to start collecting. In February of 2019, I created a Cointalk account, and I started quietly browsing the ancient coins forum. Needless to say, I was quite impressed as the dealers and collectors I knew in my local area at the time didn't dabble in ancients or anything foreign for the most part. My second motivation for collecting ancient coins was when I transferred to a new university. One of my classes in my first semester dealt exclusively with the Ancient and Medieval world and Rome in particular. I moved to Tennessee last year, and I live in the outer-suburbs of Nashville. Fortunately for me, one of the local coin shows has several dealers who deal exclusively in world and ancient coins. When I go to coin shows, I intend to find coins for my various foreign Dansco type sets or cherry-pick foreign coin bulk boxes. However, this time I went with the intent to find a nice ancient coin, and I ended up buying a well-circulated Gordian III antoninianus for about $20.00. As of today, my ancient coin collection is roughly two-dozen coins. Needless to say, I have a particular taste for coinage from the Nerva-Antonine Dynasty and anything from the 3rd century. Gordian III AR Antoninianus Obverse: IMP GORDIANVS PIVS FEL AVG, radiate, draped, and cuirassed bust right. Reverse: PROVIDENT AVG, Providence standing left with scepter, pointing wand at globe at feet. RIC 149, RSC 298
I used to collect US coins as a kid, but then became more interested in collecting stamps as a teenager and young adult. I sold almost all my US coins, in fact, to fund my stamp hobby. I had a decent stamp collection and things had progressed to the point that the stamps I still needed for my collecting area became ever more difficult and pricey to obtain and I was getting discouraged and bored. I was in theology school in the late 80s and there were a lot of brick and mortar stamp and coin stores in those days. There was one in particular that had a decent stock of ancient coins and its owner knew quite a bit about them. I always admired the ancient coins when I was in the store buying stamps. I studied Latin in college and the ancient Greek language in theology school (to read the New Testament) and ancient history (for obvious reasons). I thought it would be fun to have some ancient coins and I bought my first one--this particular tribute penny: And I followed this one with a Pontius Pilate bronze prutah, and bronze prutot of other figures noted in the New Testament, such as Herod Agrippa and Antonius Felix. By this time, I was hooked on ancient coins and set out to obtain Roman provincial coins from each of the cities Paul visited on his missionary journeys, which was difficult in the pre-internet days, especially as I wanted coins minted from about AD 10-55, which would have been in circulation in the cities that Paul lived and worked. Henry Lindgren at Antioch Associates was my "go-to" Roman provincial guy at the time. But I then became interested in Roman coins in general and, of course, picked up a nice Greek or Byzantine here and there, and expanded my collection considerably. I'm particularly fond of the Antonine and Severan dynasties and the barracks emperors of the mid third century, but don't really limit my collecting to any one historical period.
I've told the story before, but I guess some haven't heard it, and I'll add some details that I haven't mentioned before. I had collected coins for a while as a child, but eventually dropped out when I was about 12. At that point I had a disorganized mix of US and modern world coins. I was vaguely aware that it was possible to collect ancient coins, but the only ancients I ever saw in the local coin shops were high-end pieces (or so they seemed to me), well out of my budget. When I started college in 1991, I soon discovered a coin store near campus and began collecting again, but still a mix of whatever interesting US or modern world coins happened to catch my eye. I found many interesting older world coins in their junk boxes, including an English silver penny that I later identified as Edward III. Then, probably during the winter of 1993, the store got some junk boxes of cleaned but unidentified ancients. I was interested in history, including ancient history, and since I already liked coins it wa sa "no-brainer" for me to check them out. The LRB AE3/4s were in a $3 box, while $5 was for mainly Roman Provincial with some low-grade Roman Imperial asses, a few Greek coins, etc. I picked out some of the more identifiable-looking coins and set to work trying to ID them. Now, the Internet was in its infancy then- Usenet newsgroups were still big, the World Wide Web did not yet exist, and good luck loading a coin photo onto your computer (assuming you could somehow turn a photo into digital form). Fortunately the college's library did have a few books that were useful for reference. I used Seth Stevenson's "Dictionary of Roman Coins" and Barclay Head's "Historia Nummorum", as well as a well-illustrated book called the Coin Atlas whose author(s) I don't remember. The first coin I was able to identify was this AE3 of Constantius II: In addition to the junk box coins, the shop also had a few identified coins, and I bought some of those, too. I remember getting a Bactrian drachm of Menander, a bronze from Cales in Campania featuring a man-headed bull, an Elagabalus denarius, and more. The first ancient coin reference book I bought was David Sear's "Roman Coins and their Values" (4th edition, the last single-volume edition) in 1994. I was mainly collecting Roman coins, and had also gotten interested in Chinese cash. I also picked up Richard Plant's "Greek, Semitic, and Asiatic Coins and How to Read Them" which is a volume I still refer to frequently. I continued this collecting pattern as I started graduate school. Near the end of my first year I bought a copy of Michael Mitchiner's "Oriental Coins and Their Values, Volume 1: The Ancient and Classical World 600 BC- AD 650". This revealed a whole world of exciting coins whose existence had been mostly unknown to me. For a little while I focused on Hephthalite coins, before shifting to Parthians. I wish I could give a definitive explanation for how I stumbled into the Parthian field, but I really am not sure. I picked up a copy of Fred Shore's book around 1997, but that was after the Parthian bug had already bitten me. My specific interests have shifted from time to time since then, and my collecting budget variously grows and shrinks, but I've never lost my interest in collecting these fascinating little relics of history.
Started with stamps, worldwide, then USA then USA airmail then Zeppelin covers. I use to hang out with Mr. Maloney owner of Muldoons stamps and coins in Torrance Ca. Bought my first ancient from him . Roman Imperial. Dont remember the coin but I was hooked, the used book store down the street from him had a very old copy of Sear, I still have that book.
I started collecting when I was 8 or 9. Started with Moderns. Believe it or not, I found a US Civil War Token in my Grandparent's change jar. I asked my Grandmother if I could have it, and gave her a dollar bill so I felt that It was mine. We went to a local coin shop, Mr LLoyd Fudge’s Coin Shop in Mountain View, AR. He explained the coin and all the history behind it. I WAS HOOKED! In fact, I would spend my summer's savings from working (yeah, farm work, cutting grass, cleaning out barns, etc. to make money), on other US Modern Coins. In fact, I gravitated to the Odd Denominations (2c, 3c, 20c), Trade Dollars chopped or not, Fraction Currency, Civil War Tokens, Hard Time Tokens, etc. as it was cool HISTORY. Yes, of course, I collected some of the other denoms, but that was boring. No real HISTORY. After 25 years, I dumped 90% of my Modern Coin collection, and really pursued my passion of Ancient History. I captured 4 Athens Owls and an Alexander III Makadonwn Drachm. I immediately chased my real historical passion of the Roman Republic and those Entities that interacted with the Roman Republic. This is my COIN #1 for my Coin Collecting Hobby: Probly my first Roman Republic. RR M Furius LF Philus AR Denarius 119 BCE Janus Trophy Carnyx Cr 281-1 Sear 156
My story: From age 7-18, I collected exclusively US coins, usually from circulation with a small minority from purchases. From 12-22, I collected US paper money, almost always from circulation with just a couple purchased. From 18-24, I collected foreign paper money. From 22-24, I collected foreign coins. From 24-now, I collected Roman coins. My reasons for changing: 1. US coins are boring to me. The designs are lackluster and there's no real fun in collecting 150 examples of the same design, just with a different date or mintmark 2. So I started getting foreign coins which opened up a literal world of designs and a very low price point. 3. Modern US paper money is boring. Older US paper is prohibitively expensive. 4. Foreign paper money is often very cheap, and often very beautiful. Similarly-aged and designed foreign paper could cost $20, while the equivalent US paper would be $200+ 5. After everything, I decided that Roman coins were the best because they have lots of designs, 1000 years of history, and unlimited historical background and knowledge.
I've loved history ever since I was a child. I can't quite pinpoint when it started, but a major inflection point was my 7th birthday. My grandfather gave me a small oxford university press 'textbook' covering the main cultures and events of the ancient world, everything from egypt to the indus valley and from the first farmers down to the crusades. That was the first time I read about the hittites, the pharoahs, taxila, etc. and it was absolutely awe-inspiring stuff, especially for a 7-year-old. One of the stories that stuck with me the most was the persian wars. Reading about how Leonidas had stood, fought, and died at thermopylae and then the outnumbered greeks had used the narrow straits at salamis to push back the superpower of their day was fascinating stuff. After that I'd spend my free time watching documentaries about the ancient world whenever they were on, and convincing my parents to buy me more books on ancient history. Despite all that, ancient coins were still very much a serendipidous inclusiuon in my life. I had collected canadian coins as a kid, and left my collection to stagnate by the time I started high school. Then one night a few years ago, after finding a bag of old canadian coins I had never sorted through and no longer wished to spend any time on, I decided I wanted to start collecting again, but something more interesting this time. I remembered I had bought a few mughal coins while on vacation in India, and expecting there might be some hope of collecting other medieval coins I typed "medieval coins for sale" into google. Lo and behold, I came across vcoins and discovered that greek and roman coins are sold all the time, and for much less than I could have imagined. That was the moment I knew I had to have one. Well, one certianly wasn't enough, neither were two, and before I knew it I was spending a couple hours every day scrolling through auction catalogues and reading books on ancient coins. At this point my family jokes that I have an addiction. Honestly they're not wrong. In a strictly biomedical sense, the dopamine rush I get from coins, and my reaction to the thought of stopping, probably isn't far off the mark for most substance use disorders. Be that as it may, the high I get from ancients is more than worth the regular beatings my wallet has had to endure these past years, and I have no plans to ever stop collecting.
I started collecting coins as a child with the commemorative pieces that our mint put out into circulation and I inherited my grandfather's small collection, but I never bought coins, only pulled them from my change. Stopped doing that around high school and it was not until my third year of my bachelors degree in ancient history that one of the lecturers mentioned that Roman coins were not only available, but affordable. That year I bought a DIVA FAVSTINA denarius from Vcoins and have been hooked.
As a third grader, I read all of the history I could starting with the World Book Encyclopedia (loved the section on the Roman Empire) also read the Time-Life series great ages of man books which my folks subscribed too. The Imperial Rome book was excellent, especially for an 8-year old. By 4th grade I was on to Gibbon, and got my first coin in 5th grade (Gordian antoninianus) from the local coin shop. I couldn't believe you could actually hold a piece of metal used by a citizen or soldiers from the third century.
Over 60 years ago at the age of 5 I started collecting coins. First it was the Wheat Ears, then as I grew older it became other coins. It wasn't until a short time after I joined CT that I developed an interest in ancient coins. One popped up and I liked it. These are some of my favorites.
