Odd coin, anyone recognize?

SHarris

Someone told me this coin may be Roman. Here it is pictured with a US Quarter for size reference. The jpg is an attachment, please click to view. Does anyone recognize it, or does anyone have any idea how I can go about identifying it? Thank you.

IloiloKano

Looks like a US 2 Cent piece.

Oh! You mean the coin in the link?

Here is that picture.

JimK

It's Greek to me...

SHarris

I'm new to the forum and could not get the image to show in the message. Thanks, and how did you do that? And yes, it looks a bit Greek to me too, lol.

lordmarcovan

A Ptolemaic Egyptian tetradrachm, I believe.

Or a shekel from Tyre, maybe. The Tyrian shekels are thought to be the coins most likely to have been the "thirty pieces of silver" Judas received for betraying Jesus.

The eagle is certainly recognizable.

I'm not up to speed on either of these areas of numismatics, having only played a tiny bit with Roman and Greek coins, and not much with the other ancient civilizations. (You'll find these are mostly cataloged under Greece, though).

Authenticity is another question. I cannot tell if yours is genuine or not. There are a number of copies of these. Yours, I can't tell one way or the other. Look for a casting seam around the edge. There's one dead giveaway that it's a fake, if it is. So are little bubbles in the metal, which are another telltale sign of casting. The real coins were struck, not cast in a mold.

IloiloKano

<< <i>I'm new to the forum and could not get the image to show in the message. Thanks, and how did you do that? And yes, it looks a bit Greek to me too, lol. >>

When you used the Attach File(s) button, that uploaded your picture to a location on the Internet, which made it easy for me to use the small button at the top of a Reply window (fourth from left and looks like a picture in a frame) to link the image (from your uploaded Internet pic) to my reply.

If you don't have a way to upload your pic to the Internet, then attaching it as a file in one post, clicking the link in that post, copying the URL, and finally editing your original post to add it as an image is one way to get the pic to show up.

Since you already did part of that procedure, I just finished the process with my reply.

Sapyx

As for the coin, it's certainly a Tyrian shekel. At least , it claims to be.

You should be aware that these are widely faked. Tyrian shekels are marketed as a Biblical coin, the kind of coin that would have been the "thirty pieces of silver" paid to Judas. As such, these are often faked; such fakes are often sold to unsuspecting tourists who visit the Holy Land area.

CIVITAS

It is in fact a counterfeit. It matches a known counterfeit in David Hendin's book "Not Kosher".