Collecting coins, especially ancient ones, is not a new trend. In fact, this is a hobby in which people have been heavily engaged in for decades. While some people choose to collect coins simply for their personal interest or enjoyment, a few also engage in this activity from an investment perspective. To take advantage of these collectors, a number of unscrupulous individuals selling fake coins have also cropped up over the years. One should be careful about avoiding these miscreants and buy authentic ancient coins only from reliable sources like Sadigh Gallery. This is a family owned art gallery.

Online shopping has become a rage today. Almost any item is available on the virtual domain now, including ancient coins. However, most ancient coins and antiques sold online turn out to be fakes. Hence, instead of making these purchases online, one must vital reliable and reputed establishments like Sadigh Gallery to purchase ancient coins and antiquities. Every antiquity in their collection is accompanied by a Lifetime Certificate of Authenticity and additional documentation and information regarding the individual artifact and its culture.

Here are two valuable tips that can help people to differentiate between authentic ancient coins and counterfeit ones:

  • Weight:  Most of the ancient coins have stuck to a particular weight standard. As the traditional minting system wasn’t too exact, and hence certain types of variations between coin specimens can always be found. However, this difference wasn’t too much.  Even though any coin that seems to be too heavy or light according to the relevant standards can’t be considered to be a counterfeit automatically, they should definitely be given for further investigations. The range of is tetradrachms of Athens, for example, is around 16.60 to 17.3 grams. However, a few of these types are much broader than the others. As a result, for these types of coins, weight can be quite a useful gauge of authenticity.
  • Size: The Augustus struck Lucius and Gaius has gold aureii and silver denarii, as well as particular dies for each of the denominations.  Due to the various imperfect Roman flan production techniques,  these sizes of such coins can vary from one another. The Roman die-cutting is however considered to be more effective with the beaded border of the denarii 18 mm dies and aureus19 to 19.5 mm dies. There are several instances where forgers end up cutting dies for incorrect size or use the same dies for more than a single denomination. Due to this, the end result is of the wrong size.  Thoroughly checking the size of the coins would be a great identification tool. However, to understand whether the size of an ancient coin is correct or not one needs to do a good amount of research.

One must try to stick to buying such items from well-established and widely trusted places like Sadigh Gallery to avoid the risks associated with buying counterfeit ancient coins.