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V25 2022 INDEX E-SYLUM ARCHIVE 'AUTHENTIC REPLICAS' OF ANCIENT COINSMartin Purdy comments on our recent story about a man who paid a bill with an ancient coin. -Editor Martin of Upper Hutt, New Zealand writes: "I came across a similar case here a few years ago, though with not so much of a happy ending. A chap brought an ancient coin to me that he'd been given in lieu of payment for work, with the assurance it was a valuable old piece and he'd get good money for it. Unfortunately it came from one of those "Authentic Replicas" boards of crude copies made in Hong Kong sometime in the 60s or early 70s. "For those unfamiliar with them, I wrote up a bit of a story with descriptions of each for a US collector board about 20 years ago - it's still available online:" 
Thanks. Here's an excerpt from Martin's article, which lists and describes each of the sixteen replicas. -Editor Collectors and members of the general public occasionally ask about ancient or mediaeval coins that they have discovered, and are either mystified that they cannot find them in any of their catalogues, or think they have stumbled upon something highly valuable, as the case may be. Known at school as a keen collector, I was once shown pieces that purported to be Ancient Chinese knife coins, but they seemed oddly small and of a strange colour. I didn't have examples of the real thing at the time, but had a vague idea from my reading as to what they should have looked like. A couple of years later, a junk tray turned up what looked like a Roman Republican As of Agrippa; the size was about right, but the colour again was wrong, and the lettering looked too thin for the period. For six cents, I figured it was worth it as a curiosity, all the same! It was only about fifteen years later, in the mid-1990s, that the mystery was solved. I was given a cardboard sheet containing what were described as "Authentic Replicas of Ancient Coins", made, as readers may have guessed by now, in Hong Kong. Because these items do occasionally turn up separated from the board for which they were originally produced, I propose to give a description both of the original board and the various items on it, so readers will know what they are if they are ever presented for identification. I shall describe only the "visible" side from the board display in cases where I don't have a duplicate of the item that I can turn over. The board itself ... is dark blue and measures 223 x 200 mm. There is a decorative gold border (not shown in the illustration) and recessed holes for sixteen "authentic replicas", as described below. All of the items are in white metal, and appear to have been cast.
To read the complete article, see:
To read the earlier E-Sylum article, see:
Wayne Homren, Editor The Numismatic Bibliomania Society is a non-profit organization promoting numismatic literature. See our web site at coinbooks.org. To submit items for publication in The E-Sylum, write to the Editor at this address: whomren@gmail.com To subscribe go to: https://my.binhost.com/lists/listinfo/esylum All Rights Reserved. NBS Home Page Contact the NBS webmaster 
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