Why Aren't More Ancients Slabbed?

^This
Its quite a feeling to hold coins that circulated thousands of years ago. For me its a way to connect to history. Its a good thing too that nearly all ancient coins won't be damaged by simple touching; most aren't delicate like modern mint-state coins. As for determining authenticity with ancients, as in collecting other types of coins, education is key!

My coins are a mere 360 years or so old, but the same principles apply as everyone else has said.

The coins are circulated and toned. handling them (within reason of course) isn't going to damage them and you get a sense of connecting with history which I just don't think you do with a coin in the slab.

They are hand made, so there isn't an even amount of wear across the coin. Some parts can be well struck, others worn. Surface scratches, evidence of cleaning, dings and dints are all common on coins that have been found in the ground. Pretty much all of mine would be rejected by the UK TPGS for any or all of those things.

Grade isn't everything. Toning, centrality of the strike, an even thickness to the planchet can all affect the 'eye appeal' (and therefore cost/ desirability) of a coin in ways that you don't get with more regular machine made coins.

But I think the bottom line is that collectors of ancient/hammered coins just aren't generally worried about having coins slabbed. And if the demand isn't there ...

As BenByfield has noted, there are many more variables attached to the grading of an ancient coin, than with modern coins. Some intending buyers attach more consideration to a combination of those variables than others, who may have a different combination of variables in mind, that they feel would contribute to the value of the coin.

The best way to assign a grade to an ancient coin is (I think), is the way major auction houses around the World already do it. That is, give a grading opinion based on a combination variable factors that contribute to it, attached to which is a brief description and a picture. The intending buyer then makes up his own mind as to how much he wishes to pay for it.

A slab does not really have any room at all to mention what may be a large list of details to be attached to a grading, despite the fact that the coin itself may be nevertheless very valuable. A picture of the slabbed coin would still be very necessary anyway, if it was intended to be sold.

Slabbing of only a few ancient coins in an otherwise extensive collection of them also presents irksome storage and display problems.

I can think of numerous reasons why I personally don't like slabbed ancients; many ancients collectors agree with me, for these reasons and others.

Not all the TPGs will slab ancients; they quite rightly recognize their own incompetence in the field. ANACS doesn't. ICG used to. PCGS doesn't. NGC only recently implemented its Ancients service, with its own unique non-Sheldon grading system. There are specialist "services" that authenticate and certify ancient coins; David Sear's ACCS is one such. But they're not "slabbers"; they don't entomb the coins in plastic. As such, they're pretty useless when it comes time to sell, since you could (in theory) simply swap a bogus coin out for the genuine one. The goal is getting a third-party opinion about coins you already own.

Many ancients are very high relief and physically don't fit well in slabs. I recall seeing an attempted slabbing by ICG in a "normal-sized" slab, where the coin was so thick and squeezed in so tightly that the slab plastic was distorting and cracking.

Slabs were originally designed with one thing in mind: the commoditization of coins, to allow them to be traded sight-unseen via the Internet and mail-order, safe in the knowledge that what you imagine a coin given a certain grade will look like will be pretty much what you actually get in the slab. This doesn't work out all that greatly in the real world even with modern coins; with ancients, the extra variables involved in grading and valuing them (strike, corrosion, patina etc) mean a simple one-dimensional grade is inadequate and they can never be traded sight-unseen without the risk of severe disappointment.

Examining the edge plays a much more important role in the ancient coin experience than it does for moderns. The three-pronged holders coming into fashion now are an improvement on not being able to see the edge of a slabbed coin at all, but they still detract from the experience.

From an admittedly small, old and biased sample size, the TPGs simply aren't very good at identifying and attributing ancients. Just about the only slabbed ancients I have seen have been where someone has posted a slabbed coin that has been incorrectly identified. They're getting better (at least, I hope they are) but those early efforts still sitting around in slabs are not adding to the confidence ancients collectors have in the slabbers.

These ancient coins have survived for over two thousand years without the assistance of a TPG to protect them. We're not entirely convinced they need the help. Besides, are slabs really that good, long term? I mean really, really long term? We simply don't know; slabs haven't been around long enough. Will the coin collectors a millennium from now be cursing our bones for putting their coins in those stupid slab things?


Ancient coins are hand-made; they do not lend themselves to being copied by the mass-production techniques currently favoured by the Chinese counterfeiters. As yet, China is not a major source of fake ancients. That being said, there are plenty of fake ancient coins out there. Lots of poor-quality fakes come from the middle east, sold to tourists who are ignorant both about local antiquities laws (where selling fakes is perfectly legal but selling genuine ancient coins to tourists is not) and about how ancient coins are actually supposed to look. Many of the better fake ancients come from Eastern Europe, where the locals since the collapse of communism have made a thriving business out of making fake antiquities.

When even the experts sometimes disagree for years on the authenticity of particular hoards, I personally doubt the abilities of the TPGs to judge authenticity if they were submitted the higher-quality fake ancients. But once it is in a slab, people will tend to take its authenticity for granted.

Which leads to the final point regarding counterfeiting: if they can make a fake ancient coin good enough to fool a TPG, then making a fake slab will be child's play for them. Of course, this goes for modern slabbed coins, too. TPGs are, I fear, fast becoming obsolete as far as counterfeit protection is concerned. Your best protection against counterfeits is the same as it's always been: buy coins only from trusted dealers with a track record of giving money back if their coins are later proven fake, even if decades have elapsed. Never, ever buy ancients on ebay, unless you already know the seller from off-eBay transactions.

Uh-oh, I'm already in trouble.

As Sap says, the original idea was to allow people to buy a coin unseen with reasonable confidence that what they received would be the grade stated.

But hand made coins don't lend themselves to this as, while you'll probably get general agreement about which coins out of a batch are nice and which aren't, personal views then come into it much more than with milled/ machined modern coins.

As an example, here's a coin I posted before. Not an ancient, but ... you'll see that while well struck it's on an oval planchet and as a consequence, the legend on the right side is missing. Now some will mark it down heavily for that. Me? The portrait, being far better than average, makes up for it, even if someone else says it's just VF-25.

Plus, when I weighed it (something it's difficult to do if it's slabbed!) it's full weight, so it's a quirk of manufacture rather than someone clipping bits off it for the silver. So in this case, the weight is a clincher.

But whatever your views, I just don't think it's something to buy unseen on a brief description or grade, or by a poor through-the-slab photo.

Obviously, a coin is more durable than its little plastic tomb--so how is that remotely "archival"? I imagine a day when people are digging up ancients, fused inside globs of plastic that were once TPG holders.