ID Help - Various Ancient Coins

@scip, first welcome to CCF. Second, best practice is to only post one coin per thread so that we can provide all the attention it needs. Also, it would be helpful to know the weights of each piece (no need to photograph on the scale, you can just tell us). With that said, the third one down doesn't look like a coin to me but rather a religious token of St. Michael. It may have been a pendant at one point, in which case the edge should have a oddly section where the loop was broken off and potentially filed flat.

Added: this isn't an exact match, but contains many of the same design elements:

https://www.acsearch.info/search.html?id=5290882

@ Spence

Thank you for the welcome and the info about the best practice. I will make a thread for each coin in the future. I have no suitable scale at this time. Today I ordered one however together with the book "Ancient History from Coins". I should get the scale in a week and I will update my post with the weight of each coin. You are right about the third "coin" ... it was a pendant. On top there are clearly marks from a file.

@ chrsmat71

Thank you for your analysis of the coins. Very interesing ... especially the Ptolemaic era tetradrachm. I read about them today in the internet. I have eight more such coins ... they all have the eagle on the back and most were also made in Paphos. All those coins were used in jewelry (my gradnfather was a goldsmith) ... two are in keychains, one is a pendant and five are in brooches. As it seems all coins could be removed from the jewelry. Is that recommended?

I also have three more similiar coins to coin number 8.

Update ... I added two pictures.

to the Community!

nice collection-

Unfortunately, for many Greek copper and bronze coins, the answer is "we don't know" - the surviving historical records don't name coins or describe copper coin denominations in enough detail for us to figure it out. We know that in the records of some Greek city-states, the copper/bronze coin was called a "chalkous", but because this word simply means "made of bronze", we don't know if that's intended to be a specific name for a specific coin denomination or a more generic term meaning "copper coins". Sometimes, cities issued multiple different sizes of copper coins simultaneously; it's generally assumed that the larger ones are multiples of the smallest one, but this again is uncertain - perhaps there were smaller copper coins that simply weren't made in enough quantity that any of them have survived tot he present day.

We have one surviving ancient text (Julius Pollux, who wrote a Greek thesaurus/dictionary some time around AD 180) stating that in Athens at that time, the exchange rate was 8 copper chalkoi to 1 silver obol, but in Delphi, there were 12 chalkoi to an obol, and in Priene there were 16 chalkoi to an obol. For most other cities and most other time periods, we have no idea how many chalkoi were to an obol, or even if those monetary units were called that - unless someone wrote it down somewhere and that writing was preserved, we'd only be guessing, since each city seems to have made up their own rules about this.

Archaeologists and coin collectors still have to call these coins something, though; the answer that's universally used is to simply describe it by its diameter in millimetres. Is the copper coin 20 millimetres across? Then it's an "AE20", where "AE" is simply the Latin abbreviation for copper/bronze.

I have found a catalogued example of your coin, and it is indeed from Amisos - Check the Amisos page on Wildwinds and scroll down to the bronze one labelled "RPC 2144". It is described as an "AE24" and dating it from "the time of Augustus", so roughly 27 BC to AD 14. In which case, technically this is a "Roman Provincial" coin rather than "Greek" proper. The two female figures on the reverse are identified as personifications of the city of Amisos and the city of Rome, greeting each other.