Hello, Greek Coin Needs Interpretation, Any Clue Please?

Thank you so much Bob for your reply.

I have not been able to know what coin is for ages. I just searched the net and yes it is tridrachm from Phokis, Delphi.

Why you believe it not real Bob please? How one can make sure of the authenticity?

Best, Yaz

@yaz, first welcome to CCF. Second, yes this has a really great design, but as @bob and @echizento said, it is almost certainly fake. Not being the correct weight is a dead giveaway.

If you search you will come across many replicas of this issue with the exact same lettering.. This clearly indicates that it is a replica.

You could send it to an authentication service if doing so will give you more peace of mind. Perhaps they will tell you that you have a 3/4 million dollar coin on your hands! Go for it. Let us know how it goes.

In fact they DO have lettering on them...see the icollector description of the obverse legend. On legit issues the lettering is tiny, barely legible, but it is there.

I have to laugh when someone posts a coin that is so rare that the chances of finding one is a million to one. There is a lot of collectors on this forum that have many year of experience and know what the odds would be to find this type of coin in the condition presented here. A coin this rare if real would come with provenance. Do you have any provenance? as to where and when the coin was found and if it came from a collection. Without that no one would say this is real. If you feel we are wrong send it out for certification. I would be very surprised that it comes back as genuine.

@yaz, there are multiple US-based grading services, of varying quality and cost. CCF has a section devoted to them.

I think what @echizento was saying is that counterfeiting is one of the world's oldest professions. You say that you got this coin from your grandfather's collection. Right now, that is the only provenance. If your grandfather kept records as to where he bought this coin, then would add to the provenance. As far as I know, there are no coins that have provenance going back 2000 years, but the point is that your granddad might have unknowingly purchased a fake. Then this sat in his collection for two generations and now it has been with other coins for so long that it now "feels" like it must be genuine. Provenance is the important paperwork that helps us to establish for how long a particular coin has been known. For a $5 crappy coin no one cares, but for a coin worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, any buyer is going to want to know where this thing has been for the past years.

I hope your coin is real, but if you hang out on CCF for a while, you will see that both Bob and Echizento are pretty smart dudes and rarely lead people astray. I recommend you submit your coin to a grading service. If it comes back real, it would be *awesome* and you must post follow-up pictures; however, if it comes back fake, then you have learned a fairly cheap lesson ($25 or so).

Make a separate post