Rarity Of Ancient Coins/First Ancient Coin

Hello and welcome.


According to their "about the project" page:


This means that two out of the "top ten" or "core" collections of ancient Roman Provincial coins have one, and five other coins are reported from other collections or sources. If you scroll down the page to the listing of all seven coins, you'll see the provenance of all seven: five of them are listed in Museum collections (Berlin, Cambridge, Yale, Athens and right here in my home town of Brisbane, Australia), one is described as being reported in an academically researched and published hoard (Ayvagedi#287;i, which is a city in Turkey not far from the ruins of Tarsus so presumably the coin is now sitting somewhere in a Turkish museum), and one is sourced from archived coin auction data (CNG, 2005).

There are, almost certainly, a lot more of these coins out there that haven't been recorded in formal collection catalogues and/or are otherwise not findable on the Internet. As a coin from the city of Tarsus, the hometown of the apostle Paul, it qualifies as a "biblical coin" (even though Trajan Decius reigned long after Paul was alive) and as such, is probably over-represented in the collections which ultimately formed the various museum collections, compared to coins from less "biblical" cities.

If you show us pictures of your actual coin, we can try to confirm the identity.

Thanks for the info on that Sap. I gave up last night trying to post the images, the scaling was making it next to impossible to discern any details. Think I've managed it now with the images below.

Welcome to CCF! Yes that's the right ID for your coin. The Roman Provincial Coins Project accepts entries for their database, you need good pics and info about the coin. I've added several of my rare coins which they posted. There are likely more coins in museums or in private collections than RPC shows. But still there are a lot of ancient coins that are rare with only a few examples published in online databases or in auctions. Rarity is one factor determining value but condition of a coin is very important. There are lots of low grade ancient coins that are not expensive and fun to collect.

Ancient coins are a vast undertaking, hundred of ancient cities, kingdoms, empires issued coins. Many collectors focus on one area, a particular time period, region, type of coin, the Roman rulers, etc. For about twenty years I sought to get one coin from every city in the Bible that struck coins and every person in the Bible that had coins made in their name. Some coins rather common. I'm still lacking couple very rare city coins. I also collected Late Roman bronze coins of Constantine I and his family that have the Chi-Rho (Christ) symbol on them.

There are good online resources to learn from and reference books you could buy if you want. One good place to buy ancient coins is Vcoins.com. On ebay there are some honest ancient coin sellers but also some bad ones who sell fakes, so be careful.