Oldest coin with an actual date on it.

During a conversation yesterday, with a friend, who is not a coin collector, I was discussing the forum topic of coins by date, and that is was going backwards and was at 1875.
This prompted him to ask, "What is the oldest coin with an actual date". I replied that I had no idea, but know of people who would know.
Those people are you out there in the Numista world.
When I get a definite answer, I will inform my friend.

Aha, I was just browsing the coins subreddit about this very subject yesterday!

If we're talking about western (Julian/Gregorian) dates, then the earliest is this Danish coin from the numerically pleasing year of "1234": https://www.reddit.com/r/coins/comments/1s9rdy/the_earliest_known_dated_coin_using_our_modern/

But I think there might be some Islamic or ancient coins attributable to a single year, even if they don't count as having a date on them.

Thanks Cass. Any idea of mintage? Does anyone have this coin? Possible value?

There's two other good ones.

Islamic: The most famous gold dinar of the Umayyads was AH77, or around 696/697AD, though I'm pretty sure its not the first coin to carry an AH date.

Bosporan Era: It was first used on coins in 149/8BC, the earliest coin I found in two minutes of searching was BE243 or 52/1BC.

I might be being a bit stupid here, but how can coins have a BC (before Christ) date.

They just used other calendars starting from earlier events
If you know when those events happened and can make a connection with another calendar, you can deduce the year those coins were minted (even if it's BC).

For example I got this coin dated with the greek numerals "ZK" (Z = 7 and K = 20) for the 27th year of the Actian Era : https://en.numista.com/catalogue/pieces121493.html

Have a look at this article about the Caesarean and Actian calendars : http://www.forumancientcoins.com/numiswiki/view.asp?key=Caesarean%20and%20Actian%20Eras

In the book "Dated Coins of Antiquity" (by Edward E Cohen), the earliest coin was issued by the Greek city of Zankle in 494/493 BC. It carried the letter "A" as the date.

Quote: "COINMAN1"​Thanks Cass. Any idea of mintage? Does anyone have this coin? Possible value?

​I did a quick Numista search and it doesn't seem to be listed here (yet), but here we see the "number extant" is only 6.

http://www.medievalcoinage.com/earlydated/1300s.htm

I might be being a bit stupid here, but how can coins have a BC (before Christ) date.

it looks like you don't get it.

the date on the coins obviously don't refer to the date Jesus was born.
they are using there own time frame.

As we are so used to "our" time frame we recalculate all the dates to correspond with our time frame. As such these refer to dates that go before our first year.

kind regards
philip

PhilipBe,
That makes it a lot clearer. Some very clever people back then adding the numbering system for a date.
Thanks

Forum can't seem to handle unicode properly and truncated my post after the offending character. Lost 90% of the post

Quote: "Quant-Geek"​Forum can't seem to handle unicode properly and truncated my post after the offending character. Lost 90% of the post

​Maybe you could type it out, and then screenshot it and post that instead of the unicode text?

Quote: "CassTaylor"​

Quote: "Quant-Geek"​Forum can't seem to handle unicode properly and truncated my post after the offending character. Lost 90% of the post

​​Maybe you could type it out, and then screenshot it and post that instead of the unicode text?

​Shouldn't happen at all. Don't have this problem in other forums. Unicode is now universal in regards to encoding of scripts and it is extremely important in our hobby for transcribing legends...

Quote: "Quant-Geek"​Forum can't seem to handle unicode properly and truncated my post after the offending character. Lost 90% of the post

​Well, at least you didn't lose 100% of the post, which is what occasionally happens to me (in an unrelated bug).
Did you try to use a character from the Astral Planes?

On-topic, an interesting and apparently not very well researched question is which coin was the first to have a date represented in positional Hindu-Arabic numerals; my current best guess is that it is the 533 AH (1138/9 AD) copper follaro of Roger II of Sicily (VCoins example; note description), but mostly only because I didn't find anything earlier.