Value Of Ancient Coins

It may also be a matter of the right buyer seeing that coin, and needing a few to bid against each other. Just a guess, because I've picked up some obvious die varieties for cheap because I assume I was the only variety collector looking at the time.

For the record (when a new featured auction is selected), here's the auction in question.


One of the widespread myths about ancient coins is that all the genuine ones are rare and expensive, and any cheap ones you see for sale must be fakes.

The truth is, the survival rate of any particular ancient coin series is estimated to be somewhere around 0.1 to 0.5 percent. That may not sound like a lot, but many ancient coins were minted in their millions, so many thousands have survived.

This particular type of coin, known as a "campgate" to late Roman collectors is listed in my old Sear catalogue (the new catalogues don't cover this time period yet) as number 3778 and valued at £10 in "typical" condition, are among the cheapest and commonest Late Roman coins. Examples of this or similar types were struck throughout the Empire, and just about every hoard from that time period will have some examples. Even near-pristine ones like the one in the auction don't command much money.


Absolutely not.

In the old world, coins are like fossil fuels - you can find them, patchily, all over the place, and only a few areas have been "mined out". And they're always finding new sources, where nobody had thought to look before. Finally, there are many places which undoubtedly harbour many ancient coins, but nobody can look there because it's right underneath a city where people are still living, or the area is too politically unstable to allow for a proper archaeological dig to take place.

Of course, like fossil fuels, the supply is limited, and we will eventually run out. But that day is still far in the future.

We who live in the "new world" (like America and Australia) have little concept of how much as-yet-undiscovered history there is beneath the feet of people living in Europe, the Middle East and Asia.

Take Greece, for example. Archaeological sites are everywhere in Greece, most of them still underground and undiscovered. If they excavated them all up, all at once, there'd be nowhere for the Greek people to live. Whenever the Greek authorities try to build any major public infrastructure (freeways, subways, sports stadiums, etc) it takes five times longer than it does in America, because they'll dig up a few metres, find a new archaeological site, and have to wait for it to be properly recorded and all the artefacts hauled off to the museum before construction of the next few meters can begin.