Nice looker!
Posted 06/19/2024 6:45 pm
At least it's not the commonly-seen mass-produced Readers Digest coin that will turn readily turn up if you put "Gela tetradrachm" into this forum's search function. But some things about your coin are raising alarm bells for me.
Fabric: this coin looks way too thick for a Greek tetradrachm. Looks like to "get the weight right" they've gone the Indian route and made it super-thick.
Composition: 75% silver is too low. Back in 400 BC when this coin was purportedly made, these coins were struck to "as fine a silver as their technology level could make it", which was over 90%, usually around 96%. If 90% silver is definitely ruled out by your SG tests, it's definitely fake.
Style: the artwork looks... "half-finished". Some parts of the obverse design, such as the bull's legs and the woman's face, are rendered in 2-dimensional outline - as if the artist meant to go back and finish but never got around to it. And the reverse looks much more cartoonish than the genuine examples of the type that I'm seeing online.
Examples for comparison:
https://www.worldhistory.org/image/...chm-of-gela/
https://www.acsearch.info/search.html?id=453488
https://www.acsearch.info/search.html?id=9543192
Fabric: this coin looks way too thick for a Greek tetradrachm. Looks like to "get the weight right" they've gone the Indian route and made it super-thick.
Composition: 75% silver is too low. Back in 400 BC when this coin was purportedly made, these coins were struck to "as fine a silver as their technology level could make it", which was over 90%, usually around 96%. If 90% silver is definitely ruled out by your SG tests, it's definitely fake.
Style: the artwork looks... "half-finished". Some parts of the obverse design, such as the bull's legs and the woman's face, are rendered in 2-dimensional outline - as if the artist meant to go back and finish but never got around to it. And the reverse looks much more cartoonish than the genuine examples of the type that I'm seeing online.
Examples for comparison:
https://www.worldhistory.org/image/...chm-of-gela/
https://www.acsearch.info/search.html?id=453488
https://www.acsearch.info/search.html?id=9543192
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
