Russian Wire Coins... Anyone Good At Telling Year?

On another note,are these faked a lot? I just checked the bay and there are a lot of them and some are real cheap. There is a seller from Latvia that has low prices and I was wondering if they are fake being they are so cheap. Thanks,
John1

My guess is like everything they are faked which is why I buy from a dealer here in Florida... I really like these little coins and am trying to learn all I can about them. I just got these 10 a few days ago.

Crazyb0: Thank you. and they are silver. My understanding is they were made from ingots formed into wire then snipped to the proper weight then put in the die and stamped.

Thank you! I got them for 30.00 for all... so 3.00 each. He has more and I plan to get them also.

Thanks again,
Blair

Only Moscow for this period, I believe (technically, several different locations in Moscow with separate mint offices, but I'd have to check the catalog to figure out which ones apply to your coins).

Essentially, it's an archaic system of letter numerals, heavily based on the Greek equivalent (which often comes up in some ancient coin series), and distantly related to the Hebrew system used on modern coins of Israel.


For coins of Peter I dated in the AD calendar (as most of the coins here are), the first two digits are always 1700, i.e. A meaning 1 (in this case, 1 thousand) and a shape that looks like a guy with hands up (it's actually a Greek letter psi) meaning 700.
Some late issues (in the 1710s) skip the A and start with the psi (much like how some other countries' coins could say something like 718 instead of 1718).

If your coin just has the A and psi, it's 1700 (though more likely the next letters just aren't on the flan - those things are tiny, and it's unusual for the date to show up as well as on the OP's coins).
Otherwise, the next letter will probably be the units digit. It can be one of the following: A=1, B=2, E=5, S=6, 3=7, H=8, a L-shaped thing (gamma) meaning 3, a triangle (delta) meaning 4, or a circle with a dot (theta) meaning 9.
(If you know the Greek system - as used, e.g., in workshop numbers on 4th century Roman coins - the only difference is that the symbol for 7 looks more like the digit 3 than the letter Z.)

Finally, there can be a letter I, which means 10; so a date with this letter would start with 1710 (e.g. psi-B-I on the OP's fourth coin is 1712).
Normally, it goes after the units symbol, but I don't recall if that's a 100% thing. If you just have A-psi-I, then the date is 1710.

Occasionally, you can find pre-1700 coins of Peter I dated in the old calendar (there are two of those in the OP).
Those coins will have a two-letter date, the first letter being C which stands for 200, the second being one of the units digits above.
To convert those dates to AD, add 200 (for C) to the units digit, then add 1492 to the sum. If the result is 1700, you have a late 1699 coin (I made a writeup on one of those in the "narrow ranges" thread in the main forum); otherwise, adjust the resulting date by four months, since the old Russian year started in September.


...The above description corresponds to coins from 1696 and later. There's an awful lot of pre-1696 wire coins, some of which can even have dates, but describing all of those possibilities would have made this post an awful lot longer.

Kleshchinov-Grishin; there are four (five?) volumes with complicated names (which I don't recall at the moment) corresponding to 1533-1617, 1613-1645, 1645-1696 and 1696-1718 (the last one apparently exists in two editions, as a full catalog with die pairs and as a die identification chart; never actually seen the former, and I'm not entirely sure it exists, but the latter is enough for most purposes).

I don't actually own a copy (it's a bit expensive for my tastes), but pirate versions of some of the volumes show up in assorted places online occasionally (I'm not sure if I should link to the specific places).

That table's nice, but it's a bit generic (also, it has some dates that don't appear on wire coins, and doesn't have some that do).

Here is a real table of actual authentic dates, straight from the catalog (though it's a bit low-resolution).

Yeah -- the information I'm seeing here is great -- and I need more. I've got 19 coins I have as "Russian wire money" and otherwise know nothing about. Can I get a bit of help on these three to start? I feel like the loose one is the only one with a psi and would guess 1707 as a result. Is this correct?

(And one more thing: anybody have a price opinion on these for future reference? I think they were about 3 each when I was buying them in bundles, and more for a few individual ones.)