Nepal Silver 50 Paisa (1948-49) Extremely Fine

North Korean coins are often hard to find, but we can offer you these very plain 100 won coins struck in aluminium. They are part of the 2005 series of the so-called Second Won that circulated between 1959 and 2009. The coins also bear the date according to the Juche Calendar, which is named after the ideology of that dominates the closed North Korean State. The calendar begins with the birth year of Kim Il Sung, the founder of North Korea. This means that 1912 is known as “Juche 1”. However, the calendar was not formally adopted until 1997, three years after the dictator’s death.

These Russian Silver coins of Peter the Great were actually made by rolling out a thin wire of silver and then hammering out the design on them by hand. The value was standardized by the Reform Act of 1535. You have a horseman on the reverse and a legend in old Russian on the reverse. They are tiny silver coins with the denomination of Polushka and they were literally made from a piece of silver wire. They date from about 1700 and are a most unusual coin to have in your collection. Hundreds of years old and something your friends would probably never seen before. An actual coin struck from a piece of wire although it is silver wire.

These curiously shaped square silver dirhams were struck by the Almohad Caliphate, founded by Ibn Tumart, a member of the Masmuda, a Berber tribe that controlled much of Northern Africa and Spain at the time. They were struck between 1121-1269 AD making them around 800-900 years old and have Arabic script on both sides showing mint marks and declarations of faith but are undated and anonymous, meaning that they are not attributable to any single ruler. The square shape was probably symbolic and linked to the emergence of the Square Kufi c script that emerged in the 12th century, influenced by Iranian architecture. They certainly weren’t the fi rst to strike square coins as the Indo-Greeks had done this over 1000 years before but since these dirhams are also quite thin, one practical reason for their shape would be to make it easier to cut them from a larger flat piece of metal.