Funny as it may seem but overstriking does not seem to have happened in one country that I know, which is Russia.

PS. the defination of overstrike that I am thinking of is that, a new design is striked over an old design, i.e. not just double striking, but a complete new strike on a previous design.

An example could be found here:

http://img300.echo.cx/img300/8836/overstrikev27wm.swf
(Yes I did post this in the Russian coin forum too. Just in case someone here didn't notice it )

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(offtrack story)

I just came across this as I have at least 5 overstriked coins or possibly seven, and there should be another 3 coming in @_@ Russia has too many of these... ;;;

I need to start selling these, or I will be an ultra poor man lol

But yea, I guess this started my interest in overstriked coins.

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Ok back to the story, well at least, I have seen some "official" French and Austrian coins that had similar features, and some other small nations that had such events too. Of course, there were some "unauthorized" overstriking, such as China's overstriking of their own design over Korea's 5fun coins.

I am assuming that the main reason for this is because the mints were either lazy to produce new planchets, or there was really a shortage of materials.

I guess there could be similar examples when the Spanish conquerers were bringing their silver coins abroard, as their coins were counterstamped, but I don't know much examples of overstriking...

Now, please enlight me with your knowledge...

I have absolutley no knowledge, but that is a neat presentation!

Cool Stuff GXS

-Bobby

Here's a couple of examples:

http://numismata.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=148
http://numismata.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=153

Both were made for economic reasons, the Brazilian one was made to take advantage of the large quantity of Spanish silver already circulating in Brazil.
The Azores overstrikes were made to avoid that the coins would be taken out of the islands.

Jose

Usually overstrikings were done to either change the value of an existing coin, or to permit a coin from another country to circulate locally during a time when the local country was in the midst of a coin shortage.

The russian coins that you linked is an example of the first case. Under Peter II the value of the copper coins were doubled. Along with striking new coins at the new weight standard, the older coins were also overstruck to show their new value. A few years later the weight standard was changed back and the coinsthat had been overstruck were overstruck yet again to return them to their original values.

A couple of good examples of the second case are the overstriking of spanish milled 8 reales coins in England in 1804 and the overstriking of these same coins in Brasil a couple decades later. In the case of Brasil the Spanish coin was the proper size and weight to a 960 reis coin already, so why go to all the troule to melt them down, create new planchets the same size and strike them, when they could save time and effort just overstriking them as they were.

In the case of England they were having a severe coin shortage when a supply of captured Spanish silver coins arrived. Now they could have taken the time to melt them down and process them into coins, but they needed coins quickly so the Bank of England had Matthew Bolton simply overstrike the captured coinage.

Ah, that is certainly very interesting. It is true that coins were overstriked to reflect the value changes. A strong evidence that I have right now is that it seems like during the early Anna period (1730s), coins of her period overstriked coins of Peter's coinage, which means Peter's 1 kopek coins were overstriked to dengas or 1/2 kopeks. So far, those 3 Anna coins that I have are my earliest overstriked coins that I have.

I have no idea if there are any earlier overstriking examples, but I am quite sure countries such as France and Austria most certainly could have done it a lot earlier than Russia. I have heard rumors that there is a possiblity of Roman coins that overstriked over some other coins, but I have so far have no evidence of that.

Two other overstriked coins that I come across today, pretting interesting:

1894 GUATEMALA PESO over 1865 PERU UN SOL

1804 British Bank Dollar over Spanish 1780s 8 Reales