Faces on coins

**Mithradates** · 04-19-2006, 20:03

I have a fall of constantinople but chose to read persian fire by tom holland before what is fall of constantinople like sorry for being off topic but just interested?

**edyzmedieval** · 04-19-2006, 20:16

Can you edit the post and put a little punctuation please?

**Proper Gander** · 04-19-2006, 20:39

i have fall of constantinople, but chose to read persian fire by tom holland before. what is fall of constantinople like? sorry for being off topic, just interested.

**edyzmedieval** · 04-19-2006, 21:02

Oh. Depends. The book you have or my book, which I am still writing on?

**QwertyMIDX** · 04-19-2006, 21:14

Tom Holland is a hack...

It's an ok job, a lot of the coins are pretty much just copper blobs, but there are some cool ones. One is a decadrachm from Athens, freaking massive.

**Teleklos Archelaou** · 04-19-2006, 21:22

How can you not get excited reading stuff like this:

http://www.saudiaramcoworld.com/issu....of.a.coin.htm

and

http://www.saudiaramcoworld.com/issu...r.and.gold.htm
"At 63 millimeters in diameter (2½ inches) and more than 169 grams (six ounces) of Bactrian gold, it is the largest such coin ever minted in the ancient world,"

Now *that*'s a big coin!

**abou** · 05-01-2006, 07:36

Originally Posted by Teleklos Archelaou

How can you not get excited reading stuff like this:

http://www.saudiaramcoworld.com/issu....of.a.coin.htm

and

http://www.saudiaramcoworld.com/issu...r.and.gold.htm
"At 63 millimeters in diameter (2½ inches) and more than 169 grams (six ounces) of Bactrian gold, it is the largest such coin ever minted in the ancient world,"

Now *that*'s a big coin!

My parents actually get the Aramco World magazine and I asked my mother if we had that issue. It was a long shot since it is over a decade old, but it really is a nice publication so I thought there was a chance. Turns out that we did! My parents brought the magazine to me when my sister's high school band played at my university and I got to read it. The pictures are great and augment the article immensely, which is great on in its own right..

**edyzmedieval** · 04-19-2006, 21:28

Originally Posted by QwertyMIDX

Tom Holland is a hack...

It's an ok job, a lot of the coins are pretty much just copper blobs, but there are some cool ones. One is a decadrachm from Athens, freaking massive.

You call that an ok job? Be serious. It's so cool.

**VandalCarthage** · 04-19-2006, 22:45

How can you not get excited reading stuff like this:

http://www.saudiaramcoworld.com/issu....of.a.coin.htm

and

http://www.saudiaramcoworld.com/issu...r.and.gold.htm
"At 63 millimeters in diameter (2½ inches) and more than 169 grams (six ounces) of Bactrian gold, it is the largest such coin ever minted in the ancient world,"

It's fascinating, and there's so much material on it. RC Senior, R MacDonald, AN Lahiri, Prof. Dani, Tarn, Mitchner, Narain, Holt, etc. Narain has even presented essays suggesting that Ganesha was first depicted on the coins of Antialkidas. Senior and MacDonald's "Decline of the Indo-Greeks" is really one of the best books I've ever read on the subject, and the "The Coinage of Hermaios and it's Scythian Imitations" is awesome. In the former, he makes the first major attempt to put Indo-Scythian and Indo-Greek relations in perspective, thanks to a coin of Artemidoros claiming Maues as his father, and a potential joint issue of Apollodotos II and Azes.

Bactrian and Indo-Greek numismatics really is just outrageously interesting. If you can read the material, and places the kings, you can pretty much make legitimate arguments for a whole lot of different situations at the time. It's the most fun a student of Hellenism with a good imagination could ever have with his hobby

Guess I'm babbling, hehe. But when coins are 95% of the research material on your favorite subject... ~

**Geoffrey S** · 04-19-2006, 22:46

Originally Posted by QwertyMIDX

Tom Holland is a hack...

Heck yeah. Didn't learn anything from Persian Fire I couldn't have read in Herodotus' stuff, just more popular packaging. Not to mention his tiring comparisons of ancient empires with the USA and a fight against "terrorist states".

**QwertyMIDX** · 04-20-2006, 01:34

Yeah, his east v. west Huntington shit annoys me.

Anyway, it's not that numistics isn't really cool, it's that the coins I'm working with are mostly in terrible condtion and there's nothing you can say about them. I'll post some pictures of them at somepoint and you can see what I'm talking about. The one's that are in good shape are really cool, but I have to catalog all of them before I can do anything interesting with the ones that are in good enough shape to even guess where they're from. I don't have any info on where they were found either, they're just from a few dead white men's personal collections from the late 19th and early 20th centuries.