News:

Sign up for the monthly zoom events by sending a PM with your email address to Hitesh

Main Menu

help in identifying Russian coin 6

Started by jsalgado, January 10, 2024, 12:52:22 PM

Previous topic - Next topic

0 Members and 1 Guest are viewing this topic.

jsalgado

silver ; 14,5 x 1 ; many thanksfor your identification;
salgado





FosseWay


jsalgado


stef

I read the text as "ЦРЬИВЕ / ЛИКНIКНѦ / SЬДМIТР[Е] / ИВАНОВИ[Ч]" (Tsar and Grand Prince Dmitriy Ivanovich 1605-1606). The last line is not clear but could be "ВСЕѦРУСI" (all Russia). May be kopejka from Pskov.

Figleaf

This being the pre-reform characters and spelling of Russian that cannot even be read by the vast majority of modern Russians, your ability to read it correctly is nothing short of amazing, Stef!  :applause:  :applause:  :applause:

Peter
An unidentified coin is a piece of metal. An identified coin is a piece of history.

FosseWay

What gets me with these is not the obsolete letters but the apparent complete disregard the moneyers had for word breaks! Medieval Western coins tend to have spaces or punctuation between words or abbreviations, and Arabic also tends to have spaces. But on these, the text just carries on regardless until the flan runs out (or even after it's run out  ::) ) and then continues on the next line in the middle of a word.

Figleaf

You'll find that on medieval Western European coins, there were often no word breaks either. The reason - at least in that case - is that these early coins were so small that word brakes didn't make sense. Separating words would have made the lettering even smaller and the spaces would often not even have been visible to the (frequently illiterate) users.

This changes only because of the crusades, as the crusaders needed bigger coins for larger expenses. Still, there was a preferences for separation symbols like :, * or •.

In the case of Russian coins, lack of space and illiteracy may have played a similar role even much later, especially since - largely because of the Mongol occupation - Russia was backward even in the eyes of at least one of its rulers, Peter the Great.

In addition, there's the minting method. The wire kopeks were produced by squeezing the dies, mounted on a pair of tweezers into a silver wire and breaking off the coins so produced. Miss the proper place to put the tweezers and part of the text falls off - keep in mind that at this size, coins that are too small are not a problem, but coins that are too large are. Also, this makes coins oval, rather than round. Placing the text in lines, rather than around the edge is a logical place saver and if you don't care about separating words, why would you care where the line ends?

Peter
An unidentified coin is a piece of metal. An identified coin is a piece of history.