Coin/disc & script (?) - can anyone help?

About 12 / 13 years ago, I was given a couple of photographs of a coin-like artefact. I was kinda interested in ancient scripts and the friend who gave them to me thought I might be interested and wanted me to see if I could find out anything about it. I never did manage to find anything, and I've long lost contact with the person concerned, but I'm still curious about this thing. It's a gold-covered disc / coin, about 5/5 cm diameter. One face has a cross design surrounded by a border with what looks like written script around it, the other side has a series of lines with similar 'writing' - this is all inscribed, and quite roughly done - indeed, the whole thing seems somewhat crudely wrought. Anyhow, I'm posting it here to see if anyone has any thoughts on it.

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From what little I can recall, I was told that it was supposed to have been examined by experts who failed to identify it. I was also told that it was supposed to have turned up in a box of stuff found in some dusty corner of a monastery in France - when, I don't know - but this sounds suspicious to me, I heard of a few things supposedly being found hidden away in monasteries.

Any help would be appreciated - I'm still quite curious about this and would like to find out if that stuff on it really is some kind of script. I was never quite sure whether the whole thing was not some kind of spurious fake.


[edit on 8-4-2007 by skjalddis]

[edit on 8-4-2007 by skjalddis]

its extremely dodgy isn't it
did your friend offer to sell it to you for a vast amount of money
the one side has a cathar cross inscribed and the rim shows old hebrew letters

the other side shows old hebrew letters


because there are at most 5 or 6 different characters in the lettering I would presume that whoever made it didn't actually know the language and merely copied the letters from an inscription on something else
and if you look closely at the coin you'll see that it wasn't smelted
it was hand carved
nobody mints coins that are hand carved

have you bitten it to see if its chocolate ?
along with the story your friend told you its pretty obvious that someone was trying to cash in on the spooky dead religion religious artifacts bonanza

poor old cathars i always felt sorry for them
they went from being the most widespread religion on earth to getting annihilated because the pope felt like it
en.wikipedia.org...

Cathars the most widespread religion? Yeah, right, try animism!

But, other than that, I agree with Marduk. Ha, yes, it can happen! This coin looks in way too good shape to be authentic.

The Cathars, also known as the Albigensians, were adherent to the beliefs of Catharism. Catharism was a belief-system which combined Christianity with apparent Manichaean influences

en.wikipedia.org...

Manichaeism was one of the most widespread religions in the world, with Manichaean churches and scriptures being found as far east as China, and as far west as the Roman empire.

en.wikipedia.org...

anyway
animism isn't a reigion
its a belief


[edit on 8-4-2007 by Marduk]

Maybe, but one must remember that the Manichean belief system was an "umbrella" under which the smaller Cathar religion fell under. I don't think you seriously believe that Animism is not more universal that Manicheanism.

you say potata i say potatoe
what religion is Catholicism ?
are you sure it doesnt just fall under the umbrella of christianity
what about Wicca
isn't that just Pagan
religions have names for a reason
so that you can tell one outdated belief system from another

what I found ironic is when Wicca was invented by Gerald Gardner in the 50s
the first thing he tried to claim was that it wasn't a new religion
it was just a relaunch of an old one
like why bother
if it didn't work the last time its not going to on a second attempt
after all
look what happened to new coke
I hear its now perfectly acceptable to worship maid marion as an aspect of the female mother goddess, you think maybe in a few years time it will be perfectly acceptable to worship Hilary Clinton the same way (well maybe not down south obviously)

Christianity is a bit like that if you think about it
Judaism wasn't really working out on account of them ending up as everyones slaves all the time
so they just revamped it and pretended it was completely different
didn't even change half the book
just changed a few of the words and added some prayers

So many errors and overgeneralizations that I don't even know where to start...

Yeah, sure, because Christianity is so much the same thing as Judaism what with the godman and the lack of animal sacrifice or dietary laws or inheritability, etc.

Originally posted by Marduk
you say potata i say potatoe
what religion is Catholicism ?
are you sure it doesnt just fall under the umbrella of christianity
what about Wicca
isn't that just Pagan
religions have names for a reason
so that you can tell one outdated belief system from another

what I found ironic is when Wicca was invented by Gerald Gardner in the 50s
the first thing he tried to claim was that it wasn't a new religion
it was just a relaunch of an old one
like why bother
if it didn't work the last time its not going to on a second attempt
after all
look what happened to new coke
I hear its now perfectly acceptable to worship maid marion as an aspect of the female mother goddess, you think maybe in a few years time it will be perfectly acceptable to worship Hilary Clinton the same way (well maybe not down south obviously)

Christianity is a bit like that if you think about it
Judaism wasn't really working out on account of them ending up as everyones slaves all the time
so they just revamped it and pretended it was completely different
didn't even change half the book
just changed a few of the words and added some prayers

yeah you know they've practically nothing in common
oh
except for the christians have the same holy book called by the same name and filled with the same characters which originates from the same source (i.e. Babylon)
but yeah
apart from that
no wait a minute
its the same God
lets face it if Martin Luther hadn't been so crap at reading Hebrew in the Masoretic text you guys would still be calling him YHWH

anyway can someone tell me is this still on topic if we're discussing religious fakery in a topic which the OP wanted to discuss a fake religious relic ?

We're not even remotely still on topic, dude. Currently we're doing CPR on this long-dead thread. The coin is most likely a fake, case closed.

Originally posted by Marduk
its extremely dodgy isn't it
did your friend offer to sell it to you for a vast amount of money
the one side has a cathar cross inscribed and the rim shows old hebrew letters
the other side shows old hebrew letters

because there are at most 5 or 6 different characters in the lettering I would presume that whoever made it didn't actually know the language and merely copied the letters from an inscription on something else
and if you look closely at the coin you'll see that it wasn't smelted
it was hand carved
nobody mints coins that are hand carved

have you bitten it to see if its chocolate ?
along with the story your friend told you its pretty obvious that someone was trying to cash in on the spooky dead religion religious artifacts bonanza

Thanks Marduk, I think you're probably right with your identifications.

A few things though:
I've never even seen the actual 'coin' itself, only the two photographs that were given to me - so no, I don't know if it's chocolate inside

I was tentative about calling it a coin, because I didn't think that it was one, as such, just coin-like - myself, I thought perhaps it was some kind of amulet. Like I said - it was inscribed, or carved as you say - not minted, probably a one-off.

Likewise with the script - I examined it closely years ago and I couldn't figure out the repetition - I thought it might have been some kind of repetitive pseudo-magical formulae, but I couldn't identify the script that had been used - so thanks for that one

It was never offered to me for sale, I don't think the person who had it wanted to sell it - but I didn't know the owner themselves, it was a friend of a friend of a friend. As far as I can remember, it was supposed to have been in more or less the same hands since it was found, kept locked away - so it may not have been passed around much since it was made, hence the good condition. A fake? I guess someone could have made it to spin some tall story about the Cathars, and I guess with the popularity of that subject.. the 'spooky dead religion artefacts bonanza'? - maybe. As far as I know, it was never for sale, but maybe the current owner was the one who was duped, if he's kept it hidden away for years in a bank vault like I was told, I guess he was pretty well duped at that Still, I only wanted to see if anyone could identify that stuff carved on it, which Marduk seems to have done - so cheers



[edit on 9-4-2007 by skjalddis]

[edit on 9-4-2007 by skjalddis]

[edit on 9-4-2007 by skjalddis]

It's not a minted or stamped coin, which makes it a bit suspect as others have said. It takes far too long to carve out coins individually, so they made molds and either poured or stamped them.

The letters look vaguely Runic or even Ogham (but there's a lot of problems with both those interpretations.) It's not any magickal alphabet that I'm familiar with. It's really hard to see the inscriptions, but I'm half of a mind that it's not really an alphabet.

What it could be is a personal coin or talisman created by someone who was into esoterica. If so, the crosses tend to be protective/energy symbols, so if that was its purpose, it was created for good.

Originally posted by Byrd
It's not a minted or stamped coin, which makes it a bit suspect as others have said. It takes far too long to carve out coins individually, so they made molds and either poured or stamped them.

The letters look vaguely Runic or even Ogham (but there's a lot of problems with both those interpretations.) It's not any magickal alphabet that I'm familiar with. It's really hard to see the inscriptions, but I'm half of a mind that it's not really an alphabet.

What it could be is a personal coin or talisman created by someone who was into esoterica. If so, the crosses tend to be protective/energy symbols, so if that was its purpose, it was created for good.

Thanks Byrd - yes, personal talisman is pretty much what I was thinking of myself.

Yeah, I think that the stuff on it was actually created mostly using an implement that had a straight edge, hammered in. Where he's attempted to create the characters that have a curved element, he seems to have done it by using the either corner of the implement, or a point, to create a series of tiny lines or dots, and the longer lines are composed of a series of joined up short lines. The little circles around the cross must have been made with an implement that had a tip that shape cos they're all very uniform.

When I got the pics years ago, I thought the 'script' looked Runic so that was the first I looked into but it just wouldn't match up with anything much. I compared it with pretty much every version of a Runic script that I could find, plus Ogham, and other stuff like the Celtiberian script. Not that I thought that it was really ancient, but I was just dipping into stuff that I figured it had a passing resemblance to. Since Marduk suggested the ancient Hebrew stuff above, I looked at that and it does kind of fit - although some characters in that script don't show up atall and some may or may not be, depending on whether you consider a line to be the base of the character or part of the baseline beneath the character, and so on. I'm not 100% convinced but it seems to fit better than anything I can remember having looked at before, and it would be more in keeping with the cross emblem in a way I guess. Course, if it is then it makes it doubly difficult to see if there are any actual words or names on there, cos there ain't no vowels in Hebrew. At some point I may try and see if I can transliterate it using this script, just out of curiousity, one day when I've got plenty of time to spare and nothing more useful to do...