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The 2011 Buffaloes are here! We now have in stock the latest issue of the US Mint’s first pure (99.99%) gold coin. Each coin is inscribed with the weight, denomination and gold content on the reverse and comes individually sealed in Mylar plastic, packaged 20 to a sheet.
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The Year of the Rabbit gold coin is the fourth issue in Australia's Lunar bullion gold coin Series Two. The 1-ounce size has now sold all of the 30,000 allowed mintage of the 1-ounce coin, and we have fewer than 200 pieces left in stock.
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The South African Krugerrand is the world’s most popular and recognized gold bullion coin. We offer the 1-ounce size of this bullion product which was first introduced in the US in 1975.
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We have a limited stock of the 2010 Year of the Tiger 1-ounce gold bullion coin from The Perth Mint. This dramatic and finely detailed .9999 pure 1-ounce gold coin is the third issue in Australia’s Lunar Series II.
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The first pure gold bullion coin struck was the Canadian Gold Maple Leaf, now produced in 99.99% pure gold. We have in stock the new 2011-dated Maples.
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The second issue of Perth Mint’s Lunar Series II was struck for 2009’s Year of the Ox. As with all of the Lunar Series 1-ounce coins, 30,000 coins was the limited mintage.
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Europe’s most popular bullion item, Austria’s beautiful 99.99% pure gold coin. We have 2011-dated coins in stock.
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The 2008 Mouse was Australia's first issue of the Lunar Calendar Series II from the Perth Mint. We have some of the 30,000 coins minted in the 1-ounce size, along with a selection of the very low-mintage fractional Mice.
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The US gold Eagle is the most popular bullion coin in the US. We now have in stock 2011-dated gold Eagles in all four sizes.
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Platypus | Australian Platinum Platypus
We now have the new pure .9995 Australian platinum Platypus coin in the 1-ounce size, dated 2011. Each coin is struck to the usual high craft standards of the Perth Mint, and comes individually encapsulated as issued.
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We now have in stock the meticulously rendered pure gold 2011 version Kangaroo from the Perth Mint. Always a popular choice in pure .9999 gold bullion products.
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We feature the 2011 edition of this popular series of gold bullion coins picturing Panda Bears in One-Ounce, Half-Ounce, Quarter-Ounce, Tenth-Ounce and Twentieth-Ounce sizes.
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The US gold Eagle is the most popular bullion coin in the US. We now have in stock 2011 - dated gold Eagles in all four sizes.
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We now stock the “Buffalo-Indian” 1-ounce .999 silver round medallion made by the United Mint in upstate New York.
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Australian Lunar Series One 12 Coin Set
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Pamp Suisse 99.99% pure gold bars. An attractive bar, die struck and featuring the beautiful Fortuna portrait.
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 Kilogram Gold Bars
Kilogram 99.99% pure Pamp Suisse bars - Our lowest premium gold bullion item.
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We offer the Pamp Suisse platinum bars in the 1-ounce size. Each bar is die-struck with the Fortuna Lady portrait on one side, serial-numbered, and encased in a certificate card as issued by Produits Artistiques Mextaux Precieux (PAMP) in Switzerland.
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Monday, September 19, 2011
Precious Metals Coins And Bullion Bars In Stock For Sale
Australian Kangaroos
$22b in gold, jewels found at India temple (Agencies) Updated: 2011-07-04 17:22
EW DELHI - A vast treasure trove of billions of dollars in gold coins, jewels and precious stones unearthed at a Hindu temple in India was expected to grow further in value Monday as officials opened the last two secret vaults sealed for nearly 150 years.
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Map of India locating the Sree Padmanabhaswamy temple where a horde of treasure has been discovered. [Photo/Agencies]
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The four vaults already opened in recent days at the temple in Trivandrum, the capital of the southern state of Kerala, held a vast bounty that unofficial estimates peg at $22 billion.
Other treasures unearthed so far include statues of gods and goddesses made of solid gold and studded with diamonds, rubies, emeralds and other precious stones, crowns and necklaces, all given as gifts to the temple over the centuries.
The volume of gold and silver coins was so enormous that the investigators weighed the coins by the sackful, rather than counting them, officials said.
The temple, built by the maharajas who ruled the then-kingdom of Travancore, remained under the control of the erstwhile royal family after India's independence in 1947.
India's Supreme Court ordered the inspection of the vaults after a lawyer petitioned a local court asking the state government to take over the temple, citing inadequate security.
The operation began last week and the final vaults were to be unlocked Monday.
Before the trove was uncovered, there was almost no visible security at the temple, save for a few local security guards patrolling the complex with batons, mainly for crowd control.
Kerala's police chief, Jacob Punnoose, said he sent extra police officers to guard the temple and is planning a high-tech security system to protect the treasure.
"We plan to enhance security in a manner which will not interfere with the activities of the temple or devotees," Punnoose said.
The security plans include the installation of digital electronic networks, closed circuit cameras and metal detectors at the entrance and exits of the temple.
Old Money
Old Money
Photograph by Ben Birchall, PA Wire/AP
Fifty thousand Roman coins found in a field in Somerset, England, in 2010 (including the artifacts above) amount to the largest hoard of coins discovered in a single vessel—and the second largest hoard of ancient coins ever found in Britain, according to British Museumexperts.
The coins, along with recently discovered Iron Age gold jewelry—both found by amateur treasure hunters—will be acquired by museums, thanks to a series of grants and donations, officials recently announced. The coins will go to England's Museum of Somerset, which will put them on display after it reopens this summer.
The haul, most of which has been cleaned and restored, contains nearly 800 coins minted by Carausius, a Roman general who declared himself emperor of Britain in A.D. 286 and ruled for seven years before being assassinated by his treasurer.
During those seven years, Carausius spread his rule in part through propaganda—for example, by issuing high-quality silver coins bearing his likeness, such as the one pictured above.
The find also contained coins showing Rome's mythical founders, Romulus and Remus, suckling a wolf—a scene never before found on Carausius coins. Carausius may have used the image to link himself with the historical Roman Empire.
"He was a great propagandist," British Museum archaeologist Sam Moorhead told National Geographic News. "He basically introduced that coin as soon as he came to the throne."
Ancient Transylvanians Rich in Gold, Treasure Shows
Published January 13, 2011
Ancient Transylvanians likely controlled untold riches in gold, suggests a new study of a cache of priceless, snake-shaped bracelets.
Showing "no economy of gold at all," craftsmen shaped each spiral cuff from an entire ingot, study author Bogdan Constantinescu said.
Most of the 2,000-year-old accessories tip the scales at about 2.2 pounds (1 kilogram) each, more than some laptops—a heft that materials scientist Paul Craddock found "surprising."
"Yes," Craddock concluded, "they did have a lot of gold."
"They" are the Dacian people, mysterious contemporaries of the ancient Romans. Ruling Transylvania centuries before Bram Stoker dreamed upDracula, the Dacians left behind no writings but, the bracelets suggest, were apparently flush with treasure—as historians have long suspected, given the mineral wealth of the region's mountains and rivers.
Counterfeit Claims
Looters unearthed some two dozen of the bracelets—12 have now been recovered by authorities—about ten years ago at the Sarmizegetusa Regia archaeological site in Romania's Transylvania region (pictures).
Perhaps hoping to avoid stiff penalties for archaeological plunder, the men claimed that a now dead comrade had made the bracelets out of melted-down ancient Greek coins—leading many experts to doubt the cuffs' authenticity.
The new study, though, points out that Greek coins are made of purer gold than the Sarmizegetusa (SAHR-mee-sheh-jeh-TOO-sha) hoard. (Take ourgold quiz.)
Furthermore, the bracelets were found to be at least 2,000 years old.
Among the evidence of their age are dark blotches indicative of many years underground, researchers say. Also, the bracelets were found with coins produced between roughly 100 B.C. and 70 B.C., which suggests the cuffs were buried—if not necessarily created—during that time frame.
The bracelets seem to hail from the right place as well as the right time, according to study author Constantinescu, a physicist with the Horia Hulubei National Institute of Physics and Nuclear Engineering in Bucharest.
Their chemical signature matches that of Transylvanian gold, and Constantinescu suspects the gold for the bracelets likely came from two rivers near Sarmizetusa Regia.
The Dacians of Transylvania
Now reduced to faint traces of fortifications and shrines, Sarmizetusa Regia was the Dacian religious and political capital in the last couple centuries of the culture's heyday, which lasted from about 500 B.C. to A.D. 100, when Rome conquered Dacia.
Though occasionally unified as a confederation, the Dacians were usually a loose collection of tribes. Mainly farmers and shepherds, the culture also included international traders, potters, and iron smelters, archaeological finds suggest.
But since the Dacians lacked a written language, we may never understand the extent of their accomplishments. Much of what's known about them, after all, was written by their Roman conquerors—"not necessarily a good source," said Ernest Latham, who teaches about Romania at the U.S.Foreign Service Institute in Arlington, Virginia.
For God or Country—Or Cash?
Starved of information about the Dacians, researchers are mining the bracelets for meaning. What were they for?
One thing they weren't for is day-to-day adornment, Constaninescu said—the cuffs show no sign of wear.
He suspects they may have been offerings to the Dacians' only god, Zalmoxis. This, he said, may explain why the hoard rested undisturbed for thousands of years—just outside the walls of a major Dacian center, no less.
"Probably there was divine punishment, damnation, for anyone who tried to take pieces" of the treasure, he speculated. "Gold belonged to the god."
(Related: See pictures of the largest Anglo-Saxon gold hoard yet found.)
Religious use "is a very good guess," said archaeologist Otis Crandell, of Babes-Bolyai University in Cluj-Napoca, Romania.
Crandell, who wasn't part of the study, thinks the bracelets may have been hoarded for trade or intended for distribution as tokens of royal favor.
He admitted, though, that it's all guesswork "until we find them in context"—that is, until archaeologists can reunite the bracelets and their accompanying artifacts in the exact spot where they were unearthed.
But the possibility of complete context may have vanished between 1999 and 2001, when the looters unearthed the bracelets—some in a chest hidden under a large slab of rock—and began selling them illegally.
To this day 12 of the looted bracelets remain missing. The other 12 are housed at the Romanian National History Museum in Bucharest.
(Read about a "stocky dragon" discovered in Transylvania.)
How They Could Have Been Faked
Because of the murk surrounding the hoard's discovery, it may never be authenticated to scientists' full satisfaction.
For example, Craddock, formerly of the British Museum, said forgers could have cooked up an alloy simulating Transylvanian gold, then aged the bracelets in acid.
Even study author Constantinescu said he can't completely rule out the possibility that the bracelets were made in modern times. But he said it would've been in no one's financial interest to forge so many similar objects.
"The price would drop if you have 20 practically identical items," he said. "It would be crazy."
Whatever their provenance, the bracelets are enough to wow even seasoned researchers.
It's amazing "that a single object would have that much gold in it," Crandell said. "And the fact that there wasn't just one but 12—I was impressed."
Largest ever hoard of Anglo-Saxon gold found in Staffordshire
First pieces of gold were found in a farm field by an amateur metal detector who lives alone on disability benefit
A harvest of Anglo-Saxon gold and silver so beautiful it brought tears to the eyes of one expert, has poured out of a Staffordshire field - the largest hoard of gold from the period ever found.
The weapons and helmet decorations, coins and Christian crosses amount to more than 1500 pieces, with hundreds still embedded in blocks of soil. It adds up to 5kg of gold – three times the amount found in the famous Sutton Hoo ship burial in 1939 – and 2.5kg of silver, and may be the swag from a spectacularly successful raiding party of warlike Mercians, some time around AD700.
The first scraps of gold were found in July in a farm field by Terry Herbert, an amateur metal detector who lives alone in a council flat on disability benefit, who had never before found anything more valuable than a nice rare piece of Roman horse harness. The last pieces were removed from the earth by a small army of archaeologists a fortnight ago.
Herbert could be sharing a reward of at least £1m, possibly many times that, with the landowner, as local museums campaign to raise funds to keep the treasure in the county where it was found.
Leslie Webster, former keeper of the department of prehistory at the British Museum, who led the team of experts and has spent months poring over metalwork, described the hoard as "absolutely the equivalent of finding a new Lindisfarne Gospels or Book of Kells".
"This is going to alter our perceptions of Anglo-Saxon England as radically, if not more so, as the Sutton Hoo discoveries," she predicted.
The gold includes spectacular gem studded pieces decorated with tiny interlaced beasts, which were originally the ornamentation for Anglo-Saxon swords of princely quality: the experts would judge one a spectacular discovery, but the field has yielded 84 pommel caps and 71 hilt collars, a find without precedent.
The hoard has just officially been declared treasure by a coroner's inquest, allowing the find which has occupied every waking hour of a small army of experts to be made public at Birmingham City Museum, where all the pieces have been brought for safe keeping and study.
The find site is not being revealed, in case the ground still holds more surprises, even though archaeologists have now pored over every inch of it without finding any trace of a grave, a building or a hiding place.
The field is now under grass, but had been ploughed deeper than usual last year by the farmer, which the experts assume brought the pieces closer to the surface. Herbert reported it as he has many previous small discoveries to Duncan Slarke, the local officer for the portable antiquities scheme, which encourages metal detectorists to report all their archaeological finds. Slarke recalled: "Nothing could have prepared me for that. I saw boxes full of gold, items exhibiting the very finest Anglo-Saxon workmanship. It was breathtaking."
As archaeologists poured into the field, along with experts including a crack metal detecting scheme from the Home Office who normally work on crime scene forensics, Herbert brought one friend sworn to secrecy to watch, but otherwise managed not to breath a word to anyone – even the fellow members of his metal detecting society when they boasted of their own latest finds.
None of the experts, including a flying squad from the British Museum shuttling between London and Birmingham, has seen anything like it in their lives: not just the quantity, but the dazzling quality of the pieces have left them groping for superlatives.
They are still arguing about the date some of the pieces were made, the date they went into the ground, and the significance of most seemingly wrenched off objects they originally decorated. There are three Christian crosses, but they were folded up as casually as shirt collars. A strip of gold with a biblical inscription was also folded in half: it reads, in occasionally misspelled Latin, "Rise up O Lord, and may thy enemies be dispersed and those who hate the be driven from thy face."
Kevin Leahy, an expert on Anglo-Saxon metal who originally trained as a foundry engineer, and who comes from Burton-on-Trent, has been cataloguing the find and describes the craftsmanship as "consummate", but the make up of the hoard as unbalanced.
"There is absolutely nothing feminine. There are no dress fittings, brooches or pendants. These are the gold objects most commonly found from the Anglo-Saxon ere. The vast majority of items in the hoard are martial - war gear, especially sword fittings."
If the date of between AD650 and AD750 is correct, it is too early to blame the Vikings, and just too early for the most famous local leader, Offa of Offa's Dyke fame.
Leahy said he was not surprised at the find being in Staffordshire, the heartland of the "militarily aggressive and expansionist" 7th century kings of Mercia including Penda, Wulfhere and Æthelred. "This material could have been collected by any of these during their wars with Northumbria and East Anglia, or by someone whose name is lost to history. Here we are seeing history confirmed before our eyes."
Deb Klemperer, head of local history collections at the Potteries museum, and an expert on Saxon Staffordshire pottery, said: "My first view of the hoard brought tears to my eyes – the Dark Ages in Staffordshire have never looked so bright nor so beautiful."
The most important pieces will be on display at Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery from tomorrow until Tuesday October 13, and will then go to the British Museum for valuation – a process which will involve another marathon collaboration between experts. Their best guess today is "millions".
Leahy, who still has hundreds of items to add to his catalogue, has in the past excavated several Anglo-Saxon sites including a large cemetery of clay pots full of cremated bone. He said: "After all those urns I think I deserve the Staffordshire find."
Mysteries of Mercia
It is no longer politically correct to refer to the period as the dark ages – but Anglo-Saxon England remains a shadowy place, with contradictory and confusing sources and archaeology. Yet out of it came much that is familiar in modern Britain, including its laws, its parish boundaries, a language that came to dominate the world, as well as metalwork and manuscript illumination of dazzling intricacy and beauty.
Mercia was one of Britain's largest and most aggressive kingdoms, stretching from the Humber to London, its kings and chieftains mounting short but ferocious wars against all their neighbours, and against one another: primogeniture had to wait for the Normans, so it was rare for a king to reign unchallenged and die in his bed.
They were nominally Christian by the date of the Staffordshire hoard, but sources including the Venerable Bede suggest that their faith was based more on opportune alliances than fervour.
In south Staffordshire, at the heart of the kingdom, Tamworth was becoming the administrative capital and Lichfield the religious centre as the cult grew around the shrine of Saint Chad. There were few other towns, and most villages were still small settlements of a few dozen thatched buildings. Travel, if essential, would have been easier by boat: archaeology suggests that much of the Roman road network was decaying, and in many places scrub and forest was taking back land which had been farmed for centuries.
The metalwork in the hoards came from a world very remote from the lives of most people, in mud and wattle huts under thatched roofs, living by farming, hunting, fishing, almost self-sufficient with their own weavers, potters and leather workers, needing to produce only enough surplus to pay dues to the land owner. A failing harvest would have been a far greater disaster than a battle lost or the death of one king and the rise of another.
The world of their nobles is vividly evoked in poems like Beowulf, probably transcribed long after they became familiar as fireside recitations, of summer warfare and winter feasting in the beer hall, where generous gift giving was as important as wealth.
Rich and poor lived in the incomprehensible shadow of a vanished civilisation, the broken cement and stone teeth of Roman ruins studding the countryside, often regarded with dread and explained as the work of giants or sorcerers. One poem in Old English evokes the eerie ruins of a bathing place, possibly Bath itself: "death took all the brave men away, their places of war became deserted places, the city decayed."
Derrick Llander Crimarco now Derek Monasterio,
who's a mix of Filipino-Jamaican-Italian and a son of former sexy actress Tina Monasterio.
Derrick or Derek just turned 15 last month but already standing so tall at 5'10". He's got BIG potential!
In Tween Hearts, Derek plays Rick and is paired with another newbie Louise delos Reyes as Luisa.
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