Finally Hit 200 Countries!

Congratulations Wade! I'm not sure how many different coins I have, but have collected them from every country I've been to and that's 16. Of course, I do have many from those I haven't been to yet.

I live in UAE now (2 month) and was just in Oman on Friday. Since my entire collection is at home in ND, I feel like I am starting anew. So, right now I have three different countries, U.S., UAE and Oman. This does not count the recent fakes I picked up.

I'm almost there.

I am currently 17 short of the 200 mark, and each "new" country gets harder and harder to come by. So a big coingrats on getting to 200!

Personally, I only have three Germanies: "Reich" (which includes Empire, Weimar, Third and Occupied), "Federal" (which includes West and United) and "East". German states are all listed as separate countries.


For me, to be a "new country", there has to be some kind of significant change in government plus a change in borders, or a change in name. I don't really see any of that in Latvia, so I call both incarnations of it one country.

Russia's a little more complex; I have three: Empire, RSFSR and Post-Communist. The USSR has it's own separate listing.

For France, I used to subdivide it into nine parts: First Kingdom, First Republic, First Empire, Second Kingdom, Second Republic, Second Empire, Third Republic, Vichy State and Modern Republic. I've since re-amalgamated them all under "France", except for the Vichy State; all the others are really just government changes; the borders and name stayed much the same for the other eight transitions.


While the definition of "country" comes into play even more once you go back before the development of the concept of nationalism, I'd say the answer is in the thousands. Perhaps as high as 10,000.

Remember, prior to being assimilated by Rome or some other ancient superpower, ancient Greek cities each regarded themselves as independent city-states. There are several thousand such coin-issuing city-states known, including several cities whose existence is now lost to history apart from their coins. Add to that Indian States, German States and Islamic States and you easily cross the 5,000 mark.

And if that's still not enough for you, add notgeld. There were several thousand more German cities and towns that issued their own coins and notes in the early 20th century.

I'm up to about 750 coin-issuing entities, so I've still got quite a ways to go.

Awesome! I just started this about a month ago. Near 200 but its getting more and more tough, and expensive withs ome of them.
I eventually want to include a silver coin from each. I am keeping a broad view on my list, but currently its countries that have existed after 1900

Agreed and signed. ;) Sure makes more sense than counting each "incarnation" as a separate country. A simple look at the country names helps a lot - you have Deutsches Reich (1871-1948), Bundesrepublik Deutschland (1949-today) and Deutsche Demokratische Republik (1949-1990). The second one, the Federal Republic, includes several "phases" anyway - Saarland joined the Fed. Rep. in 1957, the five Eastern (ex-GDR) states joined in 1990.

Now the pre-1871 countries in Germany I count separately as well. I also consider the USSR and Russia to be different countries. Ultimately, well, there are no fixed rules in this regard anyway ...

Christian

For me, every time I hear of someone who is going abroad or coming back, I ask them to save me their pocket change.

I always offer the exchange value but it's not often taken up.
The value of the coins isn't usually great, since the coins are from circulation, but sometimes a coin turns out to be rare or valuable.

For example, from my father, 10 yen coins of Japan dated 1957, 1958, and 1959 in BU; 4 1987 1 Santim coins of Morocco from a colleague; a small bag of Russian 20 kopeks dated 1970, 1973, 1976.
It's nice to have some rarities but I'm almost as pleased to have the ordinary coins - seeing the different designs and identifying them is what interests me.

There are a million and one ways to look at this - none are correct - only what suits you.

I've just counted my "coin issuing entities" list and it comes out at 413. I do separate out the German and Indian states (and Swiss cantons and Italian states) but France is just France and the UK is just the UK - even before it is the UK - completely arbitary and inconsistant - but it works for me.

I haven't my ancients in this at all so there would be another 50 or so Greek city states to add if I did that.

What adds to the list is all those medieval oddities like the Kingdom of Vijayanagar, or the Seljuks or Rum or The Suris Kingdom or the Spanish Umayids Afghan civic coinage etc, those are very definitely seperate entities but don't fit neatly into the modern concept of "country".