Ancient Coins-Types By Time Period/Country?

Collecting a "type set for ancients" is virtually impossible, because there are literally hundreds and thousands of "types". The British Museum has been trying for over 100 years now, and they're about halfway there.

Just examining the Sear catalogues, there are about 15,000 different entries for Roman, 6,000 for Roman Provincial (and the Provincial listing is nowhere near complete and comprehensive), and 8,000 in the Greek series (which is more comprehensive than the Roman Provincial, but still has lots of types missing). Include all the types not listed in the catalogues, types not yet discovered, and the types from "non-classical" ancient civilizations (like India, Axum, China...) and your "Ancients type list" can easily be over 100,000 entries long.

Why so many? Because, while ancient coins were mass-produced (in a slow, unmechanized kind of way), the dies used to make them were not. Each die was a unique, hand-engraved work of art. Sometimes die designs would be copied (with minor variations) over a long period of time, but sometimes a particular design or "type" may have only been used for that one die.

So, if a "type set" is impossibly out of reach unless you've got a King Farouk-sized budget, what can you collect by?

How ancient coins are traditionally ordered in the catalogues varies from series to series. The Ancient Roman series, for example, is traditionally sorted by Emperor, except for the Late Roman period when mintmarks become commonplace, when some catalogues sort by mintmark. I would consider "One from each emperor" and later, "one from each mintmark" as both equivalents of the "type set".

In the Ancient Greek series, the traditional sort is by geography. You divide the map of the ancient world up into regions, and then work through the regions using the Mediterranean as a circle.

You start at the Pillars of Hercules, and work your way clockwise around the circle eastwards along the north shore of the Mediterranean: Spain, France, Britain, Italy, Greece, up into the Black sea, around the coast of Turkey, past the Holy Land, over to Iraq and India, back through Arabia, then westwards along the southern shore of the Mediterranean, through Egypt and north Africa, until you end up back at the Pillars of Hercules again. Within the regions, coin-issuing cities are normally sorted alphabetically.

Greek coins are also divided into three time periods: Archaic (the crude, early kinds of coins), Classical (the highly artistic mid period) and Hellenistic (between the time of Alexander the Great and the Roman conquests). "Hellenistic" coins are often sorted by ruler, as in the Roman series. The Roman Provincial series can be considered a "fourth age" of the Greek series, and are normally sorted by either the "Greek" geographic sort or the "Roman" emperor sort.

An equivalent in the Greek series for a "type set" might be one from each region, or (if you're feeling ambitious), one from each city.

There are plenty of other themes and topics within ancients you can collect. Biblical coins, coins of mythological interest, coins with architectural themes... these are all popular. Of course, being popular, they're also more expensive.

The boundaries between "ancient", "mediaeval" and "modern" are debatable, and it does at least in part depend uopn who you're talking to and which area of numismatics is being discussed.

Personally, I place the boundary between ancient and mediaeval at 500 AD, because I like nice round numbers, and it's close to the traditional boundary between "Roman" and "Byzantine" coins at 498 AD. It's also the definition of "ancient" in my Webster's Dictionary. Others prefer to place the boundary at the fall of the Roman empire in 476 AD, or even as early as the adoption of Christianity by Constantine in 312 AD.

The boundary between mediaeval and modern is equally fuzzy. Again, because I like round numbers, I put it at 1450, which is close to many other accepted dates - the invention of the printing press in 1439, the fall of Constantinople in 1453, the dawn of the Protestant Reformation in 1517, or (in the numismatic context) the introduction of screw presses in the minting of coinage, which depends on the particular series of coins under discussion. Another convenient boundary is the Krause catalogues, which currently commence at 1601.

For other non-European series such as Islamic and Chinese coins, of course, our ancient - mediaeval - modern divisions are largely meaningless, but I tend to use my divisional dates anyway, just to be consistent.

Late Roman coins are the least expensive and easier to find to start off with, You can start off with Constantine The Great and his family. There are a lot of types with just this emperor alone. Or you could try and collect one coin from each emperor this is a lot harder to do.

That's another good thing about starting with late Roman bronzes: they tend not to get faked. Forgers tend to go for the larger, more dramatic coins from more famous personages like Alexander the Great and Nero. That one is certainly an atypical example, but there's nothing about it that's setting off alarms for me.

First stop when buying ancient coins on ebay should be FORVM's list of known fake sellers. Absence from the list is by no means a guarantee of genuineness, but the list will help you steer clear of the known fraudsters.

I think you'll find two books of interest in this field.

David Hendin's Guide to Biblical Coins, I believe the 4th edition is the most recent, covers the whole spectrum of "Biblical coins" - if a coin or city is mentioned in the Bible, it'll get a mention in Hendin. I understand that it does tend to focus on Israel and surrounding territories, rather than the travels of Paul into Turkey and Europe. I don't have this book myself, but I've heard only good things about it.

The second is focussed specifically on the theme of St. Paul: The Pocket Guide to Saint Paul by Peter Lewis and Ron Bolden. The authors have tried to work out which coins were likely to be circulating in the various cities while Paul was actually there. It was written and published here in Australia, so probably doesn't get seen too often in the US. I actually know Peter, he's a member of both of the coin clubs I belong to and has made presentations at our club meetings.

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Are there any cities that are considered rare, hard to find and are budget busters?

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I don't know about particularly scarce ones, but as a general rule, you can double the price of any ancient coin if the city or ruler named on the coin is also mentioned in the Bible. I think one of the pricier ones in the series is Tarsus, Paul's hometown.

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By the way what coin is your avatar?

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It's a didrachm of Rhodes, late 300's BC.

Mine's a bit more worn than the CoinArchives example; I didn't pay anywhere near that much for mine.

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I think I have decided to start my Ancient coin quest based on the travels of Paul the Apostle.

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Here is a link that might interest you.

http://www.forumancientcoins.com/nu...%20of%20Paul