And a mystery coin.
It seems to be a
Byzantine follis, mis-struck, so only the left and right edges have any detail at all.
The best guess image that I can imagine fitting what's left is
obverse: looks kind of like the shoulders and the edge of a
nimbus, perhaps around the
head of
Christ.
reverse: the letter C at the beginning of a
legend. a few letters are faintly visible but illegible on the right
side. The vertical line by the C could be a long
cross, and there might be a faint
cross on the right
side that could be a
globus cruciger, both held by the emperor, whoever he might be.
I looked at every single
Byzantine emperor on
wildwinds, with no possible matches for both obv and
rev. I have no other
Byzantine sources, and this is a little too little detail to do much searching the internet for a match.
2.21g, 18mm
edit: I think I was wrong, and I'd like to amend my wild guess for this one. It's not
Byzantine, it's an
Ottoman manghir or fals. What I took as a C shows signs that it's just a final curve of a longer
Islamic script. What looked like a
globus cruciger also appears to be
Islamic script. And the lines on the other
side of the coin are most likely some of the ornate designs you find there. I have even less resources for
Ottoman than
Byzantine, but I
ran across a couple 15th century coins that, while not a match,
had enough similarity to think I might be in the ballpark. If I can hone my photoshop skills, I'll try to outline the faint contours that might not just be my imagination.
