Help!! What Are The Best Places And Books To Search

Hello and welcome.

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i have a few coins/medals that have images of christ with dots around it...

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Those could be from the Byzantine Empire, Venice, Ragusa or several other mediaeval or modern European countries.

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some have a star of david...

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Morocco and several other Islamic countries have used the "Seal of Solomon" on their coins, a five or six-pointed star similar to the Magen David.

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...and some with russian/arab figures...

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The best reference website for Asian and Islamic coins is zeno.ru.

As TwoKopeiki said, if you can post pictures of your coins here on the forum (or even just describe them in detail), we'll do our best to help you. If posting pics is a problem or you'd prefer to have a go at identifying them yourself, the following sites are the ones I use the most.

NumisMaster is a website run by the people that make the Krause catalogues of world coins. You have to register to look at the database, and you have to subscribe (and pay money) if you want to access prices etc.

WorldCoinGallery is a site put together by a collector. It's not complete and comprehensive, especially for older coins, but most of the common types are listed. Best of all, you don't need to register or anything.

Wildwinds is the best one-stop-shop for identifying ancient Greek and Roman coins. The "partial inscription search" really helps if you can only read a few of the letters on an ancient coin.

For mediaeval coins, patterns, medals and other esoteric stuff not listed elsewhere, the most useful site I've found is CoinArchives. The search engines are a bit unwieldy, but quite powerful.

Most if not all of them appear to be from mediaeval Ukraine, the principality of Kievan Rus or it's neighbouring states. The fork or trident-shape you can see on many of the coins is the Prince's badge; a similar badge is used as the national symbol of modern Ukraine. On that Wikipedia page you can also find a handy chart of tridents and trident-like symbols used as badges by the medieval princes of Kiev. It's possible to match the design on the coin with a design on the chart, and thus identify which ruler the coin was made for.

For example, the largest copper you've got there has a distinctive "asymmetrical trident" badge; this was only used by Prince Sviatopolk I, who reigned from 988 to 1019.

The grey-coloured ones aren't coins, they're lead seals, though the one at centre right with a portrait of Christ with IC and XC on either side, uses a design copied from Byzantine coinage.

These are all way outside my field of expertise, and none of the books I own cover them in any detail. A search for "Kiev" on CoinArchives comes up with this fairly short list, which does include a couple of lead seals and a few silver and billon coins with similar designs and lettering to what we see here.

From what I can tell, genuine mediaeval Ukrainian coins are both scarce and highly sought after. But I haven't had enough experience with this series to hazard a guess at whether these might be real or not. May we ask where you obtained them?

Just found out that zeno.ru does have a fairly good selection of mediaeval Rus coins and seals - have a look there and try to find some things that match. I looked but didn't really find anything. Mediaeval Russian copper coins either don't exist or are pretty scarce; most of the listings are silver or gold, and they're mostly in much worse condition than yours. You might have to be prepared to find out that these are modern reproductions. Post-communist Eastern Europe and the ex-USSR countries are notorious sources of fake coins.

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...if you don't mind me asking what period are you interested in... cause I have one more coin to ask about.. I managed to figure out its Roman from around 14ad... I think...

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I'm somewhat of a generalist, which means I like to know a little bit about every coin series. That does mean I haven't concentrated on any one series well enough to know all there is to know about it, or to instantly recognise unusual varieties or fake coins from a photo. But I do have several references for ancient Roman coins, and there are other ancients experts on the forum here too. So post a pic of your Roman and we'll see if we can confirm what it is. (Note: you might want to post it over in the ancient coins section of the forum)