Ancient coins from auctions always have a dealer's attribution, sometimes tucked into the flip in tidy abbreviations. It can sometimes be dressed up to be very authoritative-looking - and very often, is unreliable. Auction houses vary in their expertise, and even the best of them cannot be specialists in every series; everyone, eventually, makes a mis-call. The ticket is a starting point, as today's coin will illustrate. Here's what the dealer described Greek Mysia, Pergamon,

The Latin term dextrarum iunctio literally translates to "the joining of right hands" and serves as a symbol of fidelity, loyalty, reconciliation or unity of factions. Being a Roman emperor in the half-century after 235 did not promise a long and profitable career. The empire ran through some twenty-six emperors, nearly all of whom died by violence, most at the hands of their own soldiers. In 260, Valerian was taken alive by the Persian king Shapur, the only Roman emperor ev

An arched structure of access to the cavea of the Aigai theater. A canting type is a coin design that makes a pun on the name of the issuing authority, almost always a city, by depicting an object, animal, or plant whose Greek name sounds like (or is identical to) the city's name. The term "canting" is a modern name borrowed from heraldry, where "canting arms" (armes parlantes) do the same thing for a family name. Ancient visual puns: the city's name, spoken in pictures. You

Kaunian rock tombs near Kaunos (today Dalyan, Türkiye), carved directly into the cliff face around 400 BCE, their façades resembling temples, overlook the Calbys River (today the Dalyan River). The physical parameters of the coin (AR hemidrachm, 1.09 g) and its imagery: a helmeted head of Athena on the obverse; a short, sheathed sword, the city's ethnic, and a magistrate's name on the reverse, invite three immediate thoughts: It represents a self-governing Greek polis. It ref