Can I Collect Ancient Coins?

coinguy89

My mother bought me the books on Ancient Coin Collecting by Wayne G. Sayles, three of them I believe. And I bought about 15 a while back, maybe a couple of years ago thinking nothing of them. But today I just woke up and thought, this would be perfect for my father and I to collect. Think about it. There are so many options. They can go from extremely cheap to extremely expensive. They are full of history(we love that). They're are so many different civilizations with so many different designs. It would be kind of hard. It would take a lot of time. Barely anyone else collects them. Barely anyone ever gets to see them. They'd make for a beautiful presentation piece. They've got pretty much everything I would be looking for. I'm going to be reading the Ancient Coin Collecting 2nd Edition by Wayne G. Sayles today to see if it would be the right choice for us. I might be a little hard work, but I think we can handle something like this. We could specialize in one specific area or some sort. Please let me know of any forums on ancient coin collecting i'd like to do a little lurking around. I also have some questions real quick, see if you could answer them. If not fine, answer the ones you can.

1. Where can I go to find the coins values?
2. How should I choose what to collect?
3. Where can I get these coins?
4. Is collecting these safe?
5. Who here collects them?
6. Do they get too expensive for well detailed examples?
7. Is the researching too much?

That will be all for now. I hope some of you can help me out with that.

hyperizer

Well, I'm fairly new to collecting ancients, but I'll try to field your questions

1. Values are pretty hard to pin down. You can try David R Sears' books and look at old auction results on WildWinds.
   
2. That's entirely up to what appeals to you! I focused on late Roman Republic denarii by god and have also been gathering a small type set of famous Greek designs.
   
3. I can recommend Harlan J. Berk and Freeman & Sear. CNG is another big dealer and there's always VCoins.
   
4. You definitely need to watch out for counterfeits. The Sayles books have a little info. about that. It's a good idea to stick with dealers that guarantee authenticity for life.
   
5. Me!
   
6. It's all supply and demand, of course. You can get exquisite EF specimens for very little money if you are collecting something obscure or common. Like you said, there's tons of ancients and not that many collectors. On the other hand, popular designs like Athenian owls can be pretty expensive since everyone wants one. And there are gorgeous Sicilian drachms for thousands of dollars.
   
7. You can do as much research as you want history-wise. That's part of the fun of collecting ancients.

As to other discussion venues, there's FORVM's Message Board and a couple of low-volume mailing lists that Sayles will mention. I haven't stumbled across any thriving communities.

I hope this helps.

coachleonard

Hyperizer's advice is very good. As far as Roman coins, the Twelve Caesars are very popular (Julius Caesar thru Domitan) so coins from
such emperors as Nero, Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius, are quite popular and great to own. A decent looking sestertius (biggest bronze coins of the Roman Empire) are great to own. Also, a silver denarius of each Roman empeor is quite do-able, though you will have to really hunt down and shell out bucks for a denarius of such scarce/popular emperors as Tiberius, Galba, Otho. I also happen to be fascinated by the crude but mysterious coins of the ancient Celts.

satootoko

<< <i>As to other discussion venues, there's FORVM's Message Board >>

Not a whole lot of activity there, but they do have some good on-going threads on detection of fakes.

coinguy89

Thanks guys. I joined the forums. My moniker is "cwtkid".

PuddlePirate

Values are indeed hard to pin down, I'm waiting for my Sears to show up to help pricing some of my high grade coins. As to what you are collecting, well that is pretty much your choice after all. I love my Ancient Greek coins and buy them with no intention of selling them. On the other hand I buy Roman Imperial Bronze and silver uncleaned and clean them myself. If you have the time and patience uncleaned is the way to go, you will of course end up with 40-60% unattributable due to pitting, wear, poor strikes ect. The ones that do come out can be truely wonderful coins and make all the effort worthwhile.

I am currently working on an AE3 Emperor/Caeser typeset that I probably will never finish, there are about 10,000 varieties . Don't dismiss those little AE4's, they are a real challenge to clean but some of them are incrediable, all my Theodosis coins are in AE4. I am also fond of Roman Republic Silver as well.

There are a host of sellers on the Bay of E (I'm one of them "WC" is my auction preface), single coins run for .99 cents and up. Depending on your pocket book there are several sites I can think of for quality coins, Josh Morin's civitasgalleries.com is one of them and he posts here, he has some really nice peices but stay away from the turtles - they are mine

As for who "here" collects them, you will be surprised there are a group of us, not to mention the lurkers in the dark.

BigAlan

What to collect in "Ancients?" You might find an area of ancient history you like and try to concentrate your collecting in that area. Late 3rd century AD Roman Empire is an interesting period.

JZrarities

There are quite a few of us here who collect ancients.

-Jeff

Emperor Nero (Storing food in the back of his neck like a squirrel)


Greek - Lysimachos (continued Alexander the Great's empire)


Greek state of Larissa