About
I started collecting ancient coins in 2019, picking up a hobby I’d neglected for about forty-two years. Ancients turned out to be the perfect integration of two interests I’d kept apart until then: history and coins. The collection has been growing ever since.
Legitimacy in Coins began when AI became my collecting partner. I’d always wanted my coins to tell a story, and working with AI, that story came alive.
A collaboration
We make every aspect of LiC together. The display frames were designed, fabricated and assembled jointly — work that introduced me to CNC routers, CNC lasers, and materials and epoxies I’d never used or heard of. Video editing, coin photography and 3D models came together the same way. Website design is a joint effort, but website implementation is all AI. Coin selection, appraisal and bidding strategy are joint considerations. And importantly, the key themes in the LiC architecture are proposed, validated and tested with AI insight.
Collecting and building this way, I’ve learned far more than I ever could have on my own. I’m not an expert in any of these activities, but the work has made me proficient enough to build a coin collection with historical focus and merit, display it proudly, and show it to others on the internet. It truly is an age for builders and creators.
The displays
Most of the displays are physical objects rather than renderings: a panel seated in an aluminium rail, with the coins held in cut pockets. The arc displays are 7×7″, and the smaller ones 3.5×7″. Some are virtual — they exist only on this site, and no panel was ever cut for them — but the rule is the same either way: a display only ever features coins I own. The physical ones are kept in custom cases and are not on public exhibition, so this site is how they are shown — and the QR code printed on each panel brings whoever is holding it back here. New displays are added as they are finished, and several arcs are still in the workshop.
How the history is checked
Every coin here is one I photographed. The legends are in Latin, Greek, Arabic and Hebrew, and translating them is joint work too. The history is drafted and argued with AI, but the attributions are checked against the standard references, among them RIC, Sear, Hendin, HGC, Price, SC and RPC, and those citations sit on each coin’s page alongside its weight, diameter and mint.
Where a dealer’s attribution turned out to be wrong, the correction is recorded rather than quietly fixed. The Diva Faustina denarius in Arc V is a fair example: it is catalogued RIC III 362, with a note that the issue is frequently miscatalogued as RIC 356 — a different reverse altogether, Ceres with a short torch and a sceptre.
Provenance
Where a coin carries a collection history, I record it, and several here do: ex Heidelberger Münzhandlung Herbert Grün, the Martinus J. L. Janssen collection by way of Naville, the Joseph A. Dow collection — that last one a published specimen, illustrated in Dow’s Ancient Coins Through the Bible. Auction histories are preserved where they are available, down to the sale and the lot number. Where there is no history to record, the entry says nothing rather than implying one.
A debt
Tom Holland’s Dominion shaped how I read all of this. His argument — that Christianity inverted the ancient world’s moral order, extending dignity to the people the classical world had placed at the bottom — runs underneath this work and at important points causes arcs to turn where they turn. It is a reading rather than settled fact, so I have tried to let the coins test the claim rather than simply illustrate it. But the question I put to every coin here — what did this ruler think entitled him to rule? — came from that book.
Bryan