Silver Hemidrachm Byzantium About Very Fine

This is something you will not see often. These bronze coins from Greek colony city of Olbia in Thrace were cast in the shape of a dolphin! They were made to honour their god Apollo Delphinios. This name is linked to the story of Cretan sailors in a storm who were guided to safety by Apollo shaped as a dolphin, landing at Delphi they became his priests. It also likely that the people were imitating what they saw, there were large numbers of dolphins in the Black Sea and still are today! Playful and intelligent, they would have been as friendly then as they are now. These were cast in bronze in the 5th to 4th centuries B.C., and because of this process do not have a tail. They show the body, the vast majority have the dorsal fin and some will even have eye pellets. As always the first to order will get the best, in this case the shape and features!

The First Crusade was declared in 1095 by Pope Urban II and its objective was to provide military support to Byzantine Emperor Alexios I against the Seljuk Turks, as well as reclaiming the "Holy Land" from Muslim rule. The Crusades started around 1095 and continued for nearly 200 years, during that time four different Crusades were made to retake Jerusalem. The Crusades in the Middle East ended when the city of Acre fell in 1291. These silver deniers or pennies were issued in the name of King Bohemond III (1163-1201), who in the summer of 1191, alongside Guy de Lusignan met Richard of England (Lion Heart) during the siege of Acre. Richard was part of the Third Crusade (1189–1192), an attempt by three European monarchs (including Richard of England) to reconquer the Holy Land from Saladin. The coins on offer have a helmeted Crusader Knight on one side wearing chain-mail and were minted in Antioch (modern-day Turkey) which was captured in 1098 during the First Crusade. The legends read BOAMVNDVS on the obverse and ANTIOCHIA on the reverse and they grade Good Very Fine. These coins are now over 800 years old! Get a Crusader Silver coin for your collection while stock lasts...

The Industrial Revolution brought us many advancements but at the time the Royal Mint was unable to meet the needs presented by the booming industry which could not pay the wages of their workers. Also, by 1786, two-thirds of the coins in circulation in Britain were counterfeit and there was a chronic shortage of small denomination coins needed for everyday transactions. Government made little effort to address the problem so industry took the matter into its own hands. The solution to the problem began in 1786 when one of the largest veins of copper in the world was found at Parys Mountain on the island of Anglesey in North Wales. In 1787, the Parys Mines Company used some of that copper to begin striking these distinctive ‘Druid’ tokens to pay their workers and to release them into general circulation, the concept soon caught on and spread to all corners of the United Kingdom and these tokens became well collected at the time. We can offer you these very tokens that were struck in Halfpenny denominations from 1787-1794, they have the Druid’s head on one side and the PMCo cypher on the reverse. The mine is still in operation today run by The Anglesey Mining Company.