Rare Uninscribed Quarter Stater

Sale: CNG 82, Lot: 133. Estimate $500.  Closing Date: Wednesday, 16 September 2009.  Sold For $725. This amount does not include the buyer’s fee.

CELTIC, Britain. North-Eastern series ('Corieltauvi'). Uninscribed. Circa 50 BC - AD 30. AV Quarter Stater (1.34 g). Scyphate type. Schematic boar left within torque-like ring of two serpents / Large retrograde S-spiral; pellet-in-annulets in curves, pellets and crescents around. Cf. J. May, "The Earliest Gold Coinages of the Corieltauvi?" Celtic Coinage: Britain and Beyond (BAR British Series 222: 1992), 1589; Van Arsdell -; SCBC 395; cf. CCI 00.1485 and 94.0765. Good VF, flan a little ragged, hairline flan crack. Rare.

The first of these peculiar, deeply concave, coins was found by a metal detectorist at Ludlow in Lincolnshire in 1981. Nothing like it had been seen before in the British Celtic series, and at first some suspicion was attached to the find. However, the expansion of metal detecting led to further finds, and by 1992 Jeffrey May could report twenty examples known, from thirteen different sites. The thin cupped flans remain without parallel in the British series, resembling nothing more than the regenbogenschüsselchen (little rainbow cups) of central Europe, and the direction of cultural influence is a puzzle. The boar, however, became the standard type of later Corieltauvi silver coins.