Why are ancient coins so cheap??

The beauty of collecting ancient coins is that even a beginner with little money can buy small Roman bronzes form the third and fourth centuries for under $20 but if you decide to get a bit more exotic,start in on silver denarii or small Greek staters which will bump you up to $30-40 starting price and run up to hundreds!
Then once you begin on the really large early Greek coins,you mighy not consider ancient coins to be cheap any more.I've been looking around for a silver "Shekel of Tyre",believed to be the type paid to Judas in the Bible and am having a hard time finding one in nice condition that I can afford.
Check out this page,and you'll see what I'm talking about.
http://members.aol.com/AkropolisZ/page2.html

 

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I too would like a nice "Shekel of Tyre" someday.

You can get lots of Late Roman Bronzes for $50 or less, but it's also easy to spend hundreds on them if you really get into specific types, variations & mints.

 

Have you guys seen the Athens Dekadrachm in the new Triton X catalog?



http://www.cngcoins.com/Bid.aspx?ITEM_ID=96643#

est. $300,000 and most coins at these auctions go for over the estimate.

 

The very simple answer is: Because collectors of ancients are so scarce. Maybe one percent of all the collectors in the US collect ancients (and that may be on the high side). There are probably between one and two million collectors in the US (The mints figure of 125 million is way out there in La La Land.) So there are between ten and twenty thousand collectors of ancients. A hoard of a thousand or two coins gets dug up, that is one for every ten collectors. But all collectors don't collect the same thing so the if you just consider the number who actually want that item, the supply drops down pretty close to the one to one ratio. There is one available for every single collector who wants one. When that happens the collector is in no big hurry to buy one because they are ALWAYS available and you can be picky about the one you buy, That means dealers can't sell them easily and so they are discounted until the do find a market. So the typical ancient coin is cheap.

 

Cheap ancients.... I wonder why...

I just posted a variant of this post over in a thread under US COINS about slabs.

The gist of the story is that I believe that there are a HUGE number a fake ancients flooding the market. People say that all these new coins are from new finds, because metal detectors have gotten better. OH COME ON! And the collector ethic that says that you're never supposed to touch a coin is partly to blame.

I've been seeing an awful lot of supposed ancient silver coins that are not only fake coins... they're fake silver. They weigh about half of what the standard weight for the type should be. I have not done a certified metallurgical analysis, but from density and chemical tests I'd say they were a zinc/aluminum alloy, probably made from junk car parts. The color is good and the modeling is decent. If they're slabbed or held in a flip it's hard to tell, but if you hold it in your hand it instantly feels light. I think these are probably originating in the Middle East, particularly Jordan. I base this last on the fact that a colleague of mine does archaeological field work in Jordan most summers, and says his that the diggers he hires moonlight as "treasure hunters". They go out into the desert, and come back in a week with 1000 "Roman" coins... every time! They joke about how they have this great spot (ha ha) where they "find" (ha ha) the same number of coins (ha ha) every time they go out! Starting to sound fishy yet? Making the coins is the easy part they tell him, the key is the aging process. Everybody has their own secret recipe, which usually involves urine, bleach, ashes, and sand, among other things, and some sort of slow cooking over a fire. They take the coins to a buyer in town, who asks them where they got them. "In the desert" they tell him, and he dutifully fills out the certificate of authenticity. Everybody winks and is happy.

Anyway... these guys sit around the campfire and have a good laugh about people who buy these things without ever touching them, because that makes the faking job so much easier.

And the gullibility of the market is incredible... how is it that these ancient coins have come down in price by nearly an order of magnitude since I began collecting? Is it possible that so many new hoards of authentic coins could be found to depress the price so much, while the collector base has expanded? I think not! Now, more than ever, extreme caution must be exercised. The coins I examined were purchased by a friend of mine as a gift for me from a very large and supposedly reputable dealer on eBay. I would never have even copped to the con if I had left the coins in their stapled mylar holders... but I like to get the feel of coins and knew instantly that they were not silver. It's possible that the dealer himself did not even know they were fakes... but they were good looking Roman silvers priced at under $20 each... beware!

 

There are certainly plenty of fakes out there, however there are still hoards being found all the time especially late Roman bronzes. eBay has tons of fakes & I wouldn't trust most dealers there. Luckily there are some good online resources folks can use to help detect a fake before buying, many times you can tell right from the photo.

You're the first one I've seen say prices have dropped at all. Everyone else is complaining about how much prices have gone up over the last few years for nice coins. Just look at older auction hammer prices vs what stuff's gone for at the last few years worth of CNG, Triton, etc. auctions.

A Roman silver at less than $20 would have to be very worn or very suspect automatically, you can't even get any primo bronze coins for that.

 

There are a lot of fakes but you can get real ancient coins cheap...prices have NOT dropped at all, they have gone up...and I buy often.

Late Imperial coins can be VERY cheap...Usually the older they are the more expensive they become...Later Empire (constantine, constans, constantius, Valentinian, etc...) you can get nice examples for very very cheap...

try to buy a nice Julio Claudian coin like the one in my sig and the price will go up, buying nice greek and roman republic coins and they get more and more expensive....rarity of type and quality of preservation are factors...you can get an augustus or nero coin for cheap...but it wont be pretty

You can buy uncleaned lots where you buy them for a buck or 2 a coin and sometimes get decent finds.

You find fake more in the high dollar coins, few people are going to take the time to fake a common constantine not worth more than 5-10 dollars...

www.forumancientcoins.com

http://www.forumancientcoins.com/board/index.php

is a great site to buy or bring your coins to the forum and let some experts look at your coin, they are good at spotting fakes and there is a pretty large fakes database.

www.vcoins.com

is also a pretty good place to go but fakes HAVE been found there...in the end if you spend a lot of money on an ancient coin it is probably best to send it here:

http://www.davidrsear.com/

to have it authenticated.

I dont buy a lot from ebay, you WILL find a lot of fakes there but if you know what you are looking at then you wont get burned...buy from names that are known....

go to forumancientcoins forum and start reading about fakes and how to spot them, look at the fakes database before buying...

there are also a few good yahoo lists you could join...

Moneta-L

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Moneta-L/

and

coin forgery discussion list:

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/CoinForgeryDiscussionList/

In other words...there are genuine coins out there...some at decent prices...just be very carefull.

 

To see some fakes so good it's scarry check...
http://www.forgerynetwork.com

 

Contemporary counterfeits of Ancient Roman coins are of interest to collectors.The most well-known of these is the barborous radiates that were struck in Roman Britain.The barborous radiates would find a place in British Commonwealth numismatics,as would the Roman coins that bear the 'PL','LON',& 'C' mintmarks.

Aidan.

 

cheap ancients

when I mentioned the ancients being "cheap" I am speaking as a casual and not a serious collector. What I've noticed is a massive proliferation of people selling "uncleaned hoards" of ancient coins. I have seen these in flea markets, Star Trek conventions, and other places where you never saw such things even a few years ago. And the prices are CHEAP. Choice for $1! If the dealers are selling choice for a dollar they're probably buying for a quarter of that.

Speaking of ancients... check this one out! It's NOT a counterfeit... it's a fantasy... read the inscription! It's of course based on late Roman design, such as we think might have been the style in Brtiannia of the late 500s.

 

Neat fantasy piece Tom

 

I think maybe you need to get an anceint coin for Chanuka. Which region of the world would you like to get?

Ruben

 

I`ll try to answer the main question: why ancient coins are so cheap for me - most of them I`ve bought on a collectors market close to my home in the center of my city. Belive me, 90% of my coins I`ve found in a big boxes (about 30-40 kg each) with thousands of coins. The price is about 0,30 - 1$ per coin, so I think it`s cheap. Till now I`ve found 40 coins of ancient Rome, several from Gupta Empire, some coins of ancient Greece, Antiochia, arabic coins of Central Asia. Somebody can tell I`ve bought some fakes - no! Most are original. However - in this way bought some golden coins (5 rubel with Nikolai II, tscherwonetz, 20 reichsmark with cesar Wilhelm II... but in the same price from the same box I can buy 1 aluminium pfennig of DDR or 1 dime with Roosevelt. What deas it mean? Are people too lazy to find a treasure in a box with junk? So, that`s the reason the ancient coins are very cheap for me.

 

One more thing I almost forgot - Why get an Ancient coin that is so so dirty?

 

For the thrill of discovery once you've soaked the dirt off. Like opening a Christmas present.

 

nobody remembers them

 

nobody remembers this thread...

 

I do. My daughter posted in it.

 

I am a young coin collector in Middle school and I am looking to buy a roman coin from a dealer on Amazon named Ancient Coin house does he look good because I am a beginner and I can't tell I would love it if you could help me out