Need help in identification of coin

newtocoins2

My mom found this coin in a creek in Virginia. I have no other information than that. I have looked online and can find no information.

JW77

interesting looking coin, wish I could help.

ELuis

On a quick search on the net, found this hth:

TwoKopeiki

@ELuis said:
On a quick search on the net, found this hth:

What a twist!

ELuis

@TwoKopeiki said:

What a twist!

Got that from a Greek coins site and the translation to English via google.

Here is one:

HTH

SimonW

This is my favorite post this month

Sapyx

It's hard to say which came first: the fake coins, or the bogus story explaining the coins.

I suspect the fake coins actually came first. The design is, presumably, loosely (!) modelled on coins of the genuine ancient Greek king Seleucus, whose name appears on coins in Greek as BASILEWS SELEYKOY. Here on these fakes, however, the legend is blundered to read BASILEW SELBYKOY, which would translate to "King Selbucus", or "Selvucus" in more modern Greek rendering.

I also suspect that the "pig and piglets" is actually supposed to be a herd of elephants - the real king Seleucus actually did have war elephants in his army and did advertise this fact by depicting lots of elephants on his coins. Examples. But the person who made the original fakes had never seen either a real-life elephant or a high-quality ancient coin depicting an elephant, so they did a rather poor job of rendering them.

Multiple generations of copies-of-copies-of-copies then transmogrified the bad-elephants into pigs, and gave the "king" a pointy modern-style crown, all the while keeping the "Selvucus" name.

I suspect someone then made up the story about the mythical king "Selvirus" and his treasure hoard (herd?) of seven golden piglets after being given a quantity of these fakes and needed a plausible backstory to sell them to gullible tourists and locals. The Gypsies of eastern Europe are often blamed for propagating both the bogus coins and the bogus story.

Which only leaves the question of how such an artifact ended up in a creek in Virginia. I can only suppose that someone not all that long ago acquired one of these fakes, was told "sorry it's a fake", and so decided to get rid of it by tossing it into a creek.

WillieBoyd2

This is, so far, the best coin story of the year.

davewesen

@ELuis said:
On a quick search on the net, found this hth:

That is amazing. ++++ How did you do your quick search? Can you search a picture?

WillieBoyd2

The Original Poster (OP) might change the title of this post to note the identification.

Namvet69

@davewesen said:

@ELuis said:
On a quick search on the net, found this hth:

That is amazing. ++++ How did you do your quick search? Can you search a picture?

Yup, you can use the Google to search by image taken with your phone.
Love the last few words " that their treasure is coal"