After the evolution of the wire kopeks into massive sturdy silver rubles, which begun around 1700, the first female Tsar appeared on coinages, as well as the important development of coin edging technology in silver coinages.

Indeed, there were plenty of issues with the mints, as they could never mint coins into proper circles, or actually had enough silver planchets to start off with. While it was quite common in Peter II coinages to use foreign European silver coins to overstrike on, it is not clear if this practise still continued into Anna's era, although copper overstrikes of Peter I still occured till 1735.

Here is my example, but is not a typical average Anna ruble:



Usually, if you notice the bust of Anna, it should be a cross, instead of a scarf.

Edge:



This is the very first time when such coin edging technology was seriously considered to counter people scrapping silver off from edges in massive scales. Unfortunately, this only lasted till 1743, when the mints decide to revert back to the extrusive text, as they probably thought that it is a waste of space.

Back onto this topic, I remembered I did make a post of how unusual this particular Anna ruble that I have.

If you note, this is not a usual variety Anna ruble, as it has two stars, one after the text, MONETA and one after the year 1730. There are plenty of varities of Anna rubles, but I have not seen my type for very long time until this one has just popped up on auction, which seems similar to what I have, except mine looks awfully disgusting:

http://www.adacoins.ru/detail.php?gid=4&aid=4

Price wise, if that coin is really worth that much and sells over the auction estimate, I would be happy...

I have given up figuring out what it could possibly be, but it is undeniable that some sort of planchet was used for this striking, and what happened next was some sort of double striking. And to top up with it, an ugly "ball" countermark on Anna's mouth.

The reverse itself is puzzling as I can't quite tell how many strikes there were. What is more bizarre is how the crown just seem to have "damaged" but I don't see any evidence of such... Maybe there are some planchet flaws that I haven't noticed carefully.

Now, pardon me with my awful photography, but here are the pictures:






I will have to rephotograph them, but that will only come in December or even later...