not just minted
Collector guides, emperor profiles, coin histories, and everything you need to go deeper into the ancient world.
The dirham was the great silver coin of the Islamic world, one of history's most influential currencies. Standardized during the reforms of Umayyad Caliph Ab...
The dinar was the great gold coin of the Islamic world, one of the most trusted currencies of the medieval age. Standardized during the reforms of Umayyad Ca...
The lepton was the smallest everyday coin of the ancient Greek and biblical world, and the humble bronze forever tied to the Widow's Mite. Its Greek name sim...
The fals was the humble copper coin of the medieval Islamic world, the small change ordinary people spent on food, market goods, and daily life while the gol...
Few ancient coin series tell a more powerful, or more painful, story than the coins known as Judaea Capta. Struck under Vespasian, Titus, and Domitian after ...
No Roman emperor traveled his empire like Hadrian, and around AD 130 the mint at Rome turned those journeys into one of the most ambitious coin programs of a...
Few buildings symbolize Ancient Rome like the Colosseum, and few realize the Romans put their greatest arena onto a coin. Under Titus, an engraver attempted ...
How do you feed a city of a million people in the ancient world? Rome's answer was Portus, the vast artificial harbor begun by Claudius and completed under N...
The quadrans was one of the smallest bronze coins ancient Rome struck, worth just a quarter of an as, the true pocket change of the Roman world. It bought br...
The quinarius was a small silver coin worth half a Roman denarius, introduced around 211 BC during the Second Punic War. Named for the Latin "five" (it was f...
The prutah was the everyday bronze coin of ancient Judea, struck from the Hasmonean kings through the early Roman period. Modest in value but rich in history...
The siglos was the principal silver coin of the Achaemenid Persian Empire, the everyday counterpart to the famous gold daric. Introduced by Darius I the Grea...
The daric was the principal gold coin of the Achaemenid Persian Empire, introduced by Darius I the Great as part of his imperial reforms. Trusted for its exc...
The stater was one of the most important denominations of the ancient world, and one of the most misunderstood. Unlike the drachm or denarius, it was never a...
The didrachm was one of the earliest major silver coins of the ancient Mediterranean. Worth two drachms, it circulated across the Greek world for centuries, ...
Few names in the history of money endure like the shekel. Long before the modern Israeli shekel, it served as both a weight and a denomination across the anc...
While the drachm and tetradrachm financed armies and international trade, the obol was the coin of everyday Greek life, used to buy food and pay for small go...
Worth four drachms, the tetradrachm was the principal large silver coin of the Greek and Hellenistic worlds, and one of antiquity's great trade currencies. F...
Long before the Roman denarius, the drachm was the standard silver coin of the Greek world. From the markets of Classical Athens to the campaigns of Alexande...
With renewed interest in Homer's Odyssey, collectors are asking: are there ancient coins connected to Odysseus? The answer is both no and yes. The epic is se...
Every new collector asks the same question: what kind of ancient coins should I collect? Greek, Roman, Byzantine, Biblical, Persian, Provincial? The truth is...
Imagine Rome in 30 BC, exhausted by a century of civil war, assassinations, and proscriptions. Then Octavian, soon to be Augustus, realized something: every ...
New collectors quickly notice something missing from Roman coins: there are no dates. Unlike modern coinage, most Roman coins carry no calendar year, because...
Spend any time with Late Roman bronze and you'll meet FEL TEMP REPARATIO, one of the most recognizable reverse legends in all of Roman numismatics. It's abbr...
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