#leontius

My beloveds, we meet again...

Thanks!

Not much is happening TBH? Or at least to the extent that stuff is happening, in the short-to-medium term, I don't know what to say about it without some much more precise prompts on what exact kind of stuff you're interested in. I went to a beach today I guess? (And in the medium-to-long term things are too uncertain to say much about yet; too much depends on what would happen in places I don't really have influence over.)

I've moved to another country in 2022 because everyone was abandoning (and/or putting active sanctions on) my previous country due to a deeply unpopular war (that I didn't even vote for) and I was worried about being conscripted (and also for family reasons but the conscription thing was probably the main reason). Then in 2023 I saw my new country start its own (slightly less deeply) unpopular war that made approximately everyone abandon it, and I didn't really have any more places to go to... but at least I knew I didn't have to worry about being conscripted, and ongoing US support (and a long tradition of relative self-sufficiency, even if mostly for religious reasons) means that the sanctions are barely noticeable so far.

Not counting circulation finds, I had bought a grand total of about ten coins for my collection since October 2022. (I've received a few hundred more as gifts from friendly relatives.)

Favorite coin... it's a really hard question, you know! I don't recall your criteria/preferences for good coins offhand, and maybe if I knew them (I think I've seen them posted at some point...) I'd figure out which of my coins was the best fit for those. But also maybe that's not the right question to ask anyway.

For what it's worth, as of the moment I started writing this response, the first coin I thought of was that one silver coin I accidentally got for way under its true value because it was in such perfect condition that I thought it was probably made of aluminium (and accidentally confused it with a vaguely similar aluminium type while initially looking it up, though I don't recall whether that happened before or after I decided that it couldn't possibly be silver), and the dealer knew even less about those coins than I did, so he believed me and lowballed the price.

Then I figured out what went wrong and posted that on a forum, and it was a whole mess, and I eventually came clean to the dealer, and IIRC he basically said something to the effect of "I mean I didn't invest in it much either, happy that it's with someone who at least knows what it is". (Then I proceeded to buy a semi-key-date Barber quarter from him for under melt - and this time I did ask several times if he was sure about the price. I miss that guy.)

Yemen - North Mutawakkilite Kingdom (1918-62) Yahya Muhammad Hamid ed-Din (r. 1918-48) AR 1/10 (Imadi) riyal 1362 or 1364 AH? = 1943 or 1945 AD? Y# 5.5, Numista 39981 (my coin is currently the page example)

"Wait, if the coin is in such great condition, then how could there be an uncertainty in the date?"

That's because it's an overdate! The 6 is engraved over a 4 (that is, ٦ over ٤ - you can see both shapes here, but the 4 is mostly obscured), and the last digit is either 4 over 2, or 2 over 4 - but both of the ٤ (4) and ٢ (2) shapes are strong enough that it's hard to tell which was there first, and of course both 1364/42 and 1362/44 are chronologically possible.

The references (i.e. Krause) include 1362/44 (though I've never seen an example labeled as such), but not 1364/42, as a possible option; they do, however, have 1364/43, for which the NGC World Coin Price Guide provides this example... an exact die match to my coin.

Unfortunately, a comparison of their coin and mine makes it clear that the supposed "3" is almost certainly a misreading; a combination of wear (flattening out the relevant area) and what appears to be a slight crack (?) gives the digit ٢ (2) a seeming extra bump at the top, making it look like ٣ (3). On my coin there is no bump and the digit can only be read as 2.

I've been uncertain over the years I've had this coin over whether it's actually dated 1364 (1945 AD) or 1362 (1943 AD), though I tended to default to the former. I thought that this is entirely unknowable, but now that I think about it, it might theoretically be possible to find a match to the pre-rework die, and see if it says 1342 or 1344? But there's not a lot of those 1/10 riyal coins depicted online in the first place, and none of the ones I could find seem to match this die - and of course there's no reason to assume that the die as originally made was used to mint coins at all, as opposed to being some kind of unneeded surplus that got reused two decades later.

...Comparing the styles, I think 1344 (and consequently 1362) is more plausible, but I can't be very sure. But at least now I've figured out at least a theoretical possibility for how it could eventually be known what it actually is?

Numismatics is complicated.

(Maybe some day I'll actually write up my extensive post on a possible reattribution of the monogram AE4 type traditionally attributed to the usurper Leontius... I was a good way in before I discovered that the question was treated in far more detail, with far more examined examples, in a Swiss article from 2020. Of course the article is [mostly] in Italian, and IIRC it did not raise some of the points I noticed, so maybe it is worth writing out my version as well. TL/DR: it's probably not Leontius, but it's hard to say who it might be, and the only other historical attribution for the type makes the Leontius option look sane.)

Anthologia Palatina 5.295 = Leontius (6th cent. CE) Brush, o goblet, against the lips that drip with honey; You’ve obtained them, drain them dry – I don’t begrudge it, But oh, I wish I had your lot! Ψαῦε μελισταγέων στομάτων, δέπας: εὗρες, ἄμελγε: οὐ φθονέω, τὴν σὴν δ᾽ ἤθελον αἶσαν ἔχειν.