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 Replies: 6 / Views: 1,705 |
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Pillar of the Community
United States
4883 Posts |
I had the good fortune to get to go through an unsorted older collection today, and this is one of the oddities I plucked out. It has some characteristics of what would be considered for the purposes of this forum an ancient, but the apparent "20 Cash" denomination suggests it may in fact be of a more modern origin. On the other hand, if what I'm taking as an "A" there is in fact the letter delta, it could be something entirely different, like a mint mark. So I'll start this off in the general identification forum. I'm interpreting the obverse motif as a depiction of a boar carrying a snake in its mouth. I've researched it on that basis without any positive results, however. About 21 mm in diameter, evidently bronze in composition (perhaps traces of a silver wash), with the weight coming in at 8.72 grams.   Colligo ergo sum
Edited by Lucky Cuss
09/12/2018 07:09 am
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Pillar of the Community
United States
1913 Posts |
This could be Mysore. They have crude elephants on many old coins.
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Valued Member
United States
257 Posts |
Looks like Mysore C# 177 (1811-1833), but that's an ugly elephant (or mouse with a long tongue) on this coin. Is it just a die variation or a counterfeit?
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Pillar of the Community
 United States
4883 Posts |
Quote:
This could be Mysore. They have crude elephants on many old coins. With that suggestion, I can now see how that might in fact be an elephant. But in reviewing a pair of websites on the coins of Mysore, I couldn't spot any precise match to my specimen. But I'm pretty well convinced that you're on the right track towards identifying this. It looks to me that there's the sun and the moon flanking the symbol at the top of the obverse, which corresponds with a known Mysore motif. Quote:
...but that's an ugly elephant (or mouse with a long tongue) on this coin. I also had the passing notion that this was supposed to be a rodent, but the apparent tusks ruled that out. I've looked up that #177 type (a particularly nice example being pictured below), and certainly that shares many design elements with my coin, although as you point out, mine seems like a poor copy more than anything else.  Colligo ergo sum
Edited by Lucky Cuss
09/12/2018 11:17 am
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Pillar of the Community
United States
1913 Posts |
We probably have different references, images in a couple of my books is a good match for your first post. The C#177a looks right.
Edited by Albert
09/12/2018 12:29 pm
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Moderator
 Australia
16817 Posts |
These coins are made with hand-carved dies. That means that, like with ancient coins, there's a lot of variation between dies for coins that are ostensibly the same.
Don't say "infinitely" when you mean "very"; otherwise, you'll have no word left when you want to talk about something really infinite. - C. S. Lewis
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Pillar of the Community
United States
1913 Posts |
I found a number of images for the same coin, so that is on par with the post just above. I also found different catalog numbers. One catalog had #176 while others had #177a and others had "type III" or "type IV" instead of different numbers. Here is a crude scan from one old book.  |
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Replies: 6 / Views: 1,705 |
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Posted 09/12/2018 08:00 am
