I just got back from a coin show. My goal was to add a couple of old coins to my collection, specifically pre-1800 American coins, for around 20. One guy i talked to said he didn't have anything like that, so i asked if he had maybe something older. I ended up buying a Herod Agrippa coin, (grandson of the guy who tried to kill Jesus,) made in about 41 AD. Apparently he jailed one of the apostles and had a saint executed. I paid 24.50.
I’m a beginner about coin collecting, and this is my first non-US coin. It seems unbelievable to me that a 1,971 year old coin even exists, much less the amount i paid for it. Even in museums, maybe the oldest thing ive ever seen was Egyptian mummies.
How can something this old be that cheap? Lets assume the coin is genuine.
It may be old, but they aren’t all that rare. Many old coins, especially from large empires like the Romans, were minted in huge numbers, and are often found in piles of thousands of coins. With so many available on the market they just aren’t worth much.
Google “thousands of roman coins found” and you’ll be surprised how common these news stories are. You can easily find dozens of stories of people finding thousands, sometimes even tens of thousands, of coins all at one time.
Of course Romans didn’t have any of those nice friendly banks that keep all our money safe for us and pay us so much for the privilege of using it. They just buried their savings and sometimes never made it back to collect.
Remember, we’re talking about an empire that spanned most of Europe and the Mediterranean. You need a lot of money to keep an empire that size running, and it was made out of materials that last darned near forever. It could, of course, be lost by being melted down to make something else, but why bother? Gold is gold, regardless of its shape, and it’d be nearly as easy just to keep on spending the Roman gold and silver in its original form (any merchant you spend it at is going to weigh the coins anyway).
I paid a bit more (IIRC, about $70 for a Jewish coin, and $150 for a silver Roman coin -Vespasian, I think.). As our guide mentioned, these were not only found in hordes but also in sewers (what have the Romans ever done for us?) and in toilet holes. If you didn’t keep a good hold of your moneybag, maybe a few days’ wages wasn’t worth an outhouse dive.
I don’t think it has to do with amount. The 1996 American silver eagle, for example is worth twice as much as other years because mintage was 4 million, relatively small compared to others. Also, he was only a ruler for like 3 years, and for only over judea. For roman coins, it should be a small mintage. One theory is possibly because it doesn’t have his face on it, and the design is not attractive.
It has to do with supply and demand. Did you go shopping for that specific coin or would any 2000 year old coin do? There are thousands upon thousands of random old coins and only specific ones are sought after.
The American Silver eagle has a built in floor value (the silver content) and an active collector base. There’s not much of a collect demand for the Roman coins.
That was weird too. All his other coins had a minimum value of like 100-200$, most newer. The popular ones seemed to with a person named Caesar’s face on it. I got the distinct sense i was dealing with 2 thousand year old trading cards. The one i got was the oldest he had i think.
