[BEFORE/AFTER] Minted to commemorate the founding of Constantinople.
[BEFORE/AFTER] Minted to commemorate the founding of Constantinople.
When I first started cleaning Ancient Coins, I bought a bag of "practice coins". They're coins in such poor condition that they're sold in bags by the pound. The vast majority of the coins are almost completely unidentifiable. I spent a year cleaning every coin in that bag (over 100) learning how to clean coins without damaging them. This is the best coin in the entire bag. I find it neat because its a coin made to celebrate the famous city of Constantinople. This particular coin was minted in Thessalonica (Greece). If you don't know Roman history then you might find it strange to see two kids being suckled by a Wolf but this is a symbol for the city of Rome and the two kids are Romulus and Remus which is from the story of the founding of Rome. On the obverse is Roma the "personification" of Rome. Normally coins of this type have two stars above the wolf, but I only see 1 on this one. I don't know if I have something special or not but I doubt it. You can much better examples of this coin here RIC VII Thessalonica 187
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I used to clean coins, but I didn't have the patience you clearly have :D These days I only buy coins on auctions, but some of my favourite collectors are also extremely talented coin cleaners.
I also wanted to let you guys know about the more generally focused Ancient Coins community I am starting up. Give it a spin if you feel like it, the hobbies are of course separate but related.
Welcome :-) I've joined your community and look forward to posting there for some attribution help in the future. I was a lurker sometimes poster on the Reddit ancient coins subreddit, but I never really felt welcome because coin cleaning is generally negatively received there (with occasional exceptions). I can understand why because there is no shortage of people that buy ancients that are already cleaned and want to clean them, leading to an over cleaned coin at best and a destroyed one at worst. If you get those guys there send em here and we can reassure them that the coin is already clean. Maybe they'll see examples of actually dirty coins that need cleaning and see that theirs is in good shape.
Coin cleaning, when done right, is absolutely an art form. It's just that almost no-one does it right :D
You should check out Romanorum Coins on instagram, it's run by a friend of mine who is just fantastic at cleaning coins.
Woah! Nice, thanks for the link. I bought his book. :-) looks like his store has some great tools too, I already have several of them but there are others I don't already have that could prove very useful. Thank you.