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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;Parthicus, post: 4985328, member: 81887&quot;]I&#039;ve told the story before, but I guess some haven&#039;t heard it, and I&#039;ll add some details that I haven&#039;t mentioned before.</p><p><br /></p><p>I had collected coins for a while as a child, but eventually dropped out when I was about 12.&nbsp; At that point I had a disorganized mix of US and modern world coins.&nbsp; 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.</p><p><br /></p><p>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.&nbsp; I found many interesting older world coins in their junk boxes, including an English silver penny that I later identified as Edward III.&nbsp; Then, probably during the winter of 1993, the store got some junk boxes of cleaned but unidentified ancients.&nbsp; I was interested in history, including ancient history, and since I already liked coins it wa sa &quot;no-brainer&quot; 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.&nbsp; I picked out some of the more identifiable-looking coins and set to work trying to ID them.</p><p><br /></p><p>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).&nbsp; Fortunately the college&#039;s library did have a few books that were useful for reference.&nbsp; I used Seth Stevenson&#039;s &quot;Dictionary of Roman Coins&quot; and Barclay Head&#039;s &quot;Historia Nummorum&quot;, as well as a well-illustrated book called the Coin Atlas whose author(s) I don&#039;t remember. The first coin I was able to identify was this AE3 of Constantius II:</p><p>[ATTACH=full]1197755[/ATTACH]</p><p>In addition to the junk box coins, the shop also had a few identified coins, and I bought some of those, too.&nbsp; I remember getting a Bactrian drachm of Menander, a bronze from Cales in Campania featuring a man-headed bull, an Elagabalus denarius, and more.&nbsp; The first ancient coin reference book I bought was David Sear&#039;s &quot;Roman Coins and their Values&quot; (4th edition, the last single-volume edition) in 1994.&nbsp; I was mainly collecting Roman coins, and had also gotten interested in Chinese cash.&nbsp; I also picked up Richard Plant&#039;s &quot;Greek, Semitic, and Asiatic Coins and How to Read Them&quot; which is a volume I still refer to frequently.</p><p><br /></p><p>I continued this collecting pattern as I started graduate school.&nbsp; Near the end of my first year I bought a copy of Michael Mitchiner&#039;s &quot;Oriental Coins and Their Values, Volume 1: The Ancient and Classical World 600 BC- AD 650&quot;.&nbsp; This revealed a whole world of exciting coins whose existence had been mostly unknown to me.&nbsp; For a little while I focused on Hephthalite coins, before shifting to Parthians.&nbsp; I wish I could give a definitive explanation for how I stumbled into the Parthian field, but I really am not sure.&nbsp; I picked up a copy of Fred Shore&#039;s book around 1997, but that was after the Parthian bug had already bitten me.&nbsp; My specific interests have shifted from time to time since then, and my collecting budget variously grows and shrinks, but I&#039;ve never lost my interest in collecting these fascinating little relics of history.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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