Why the name "South-Africa" on slabbed ZAR coins?

[republikein 10]

Why was the country ZAR written out of history by the grading companies?

 

NGC and PCGS (and other grading companies) grade ZAR coins with the counntry name "South-Africa" thereon. As far as I am concerned, this is totally incorrect and a technical denial that there ever exixts a country by the name of the Zuid-Afrikaansche Republiek. A ZAR coin that is labelled South-Africa? Does it make sense? This confuses people. There is absolutely no correlation between the ZAR and SA other than the fact that the ZAR eventually went up into the RSA.

 

Is it too late to inform these companies about the fact that the ZAR was an independent country that cannot be renamed or changed to South-Africa? Are other countries that ceased to exist, also being written out of history like this? As an example, the German Empire also went up into the later Germany, but coins from the German Empire are still named "German Empire".

 

Any comments?

[Pierre_Henri 35]

This is a sensitive issue and many Afrikaans speaking (and other) collectors will agree with you.

 

But I don't think there is bad intend on the part of the grading companies -- or from the major international catalogues like Krause and Mishler who publish the ZAR coins under all South African issues.

 

Take a country like Switzerland who struck their coins with the name of "Helvetia". I haven't look but I guess NGC and PCGS will grade Swiss coins under the name "Switzerland" and not "Helvetia".

 

Or countries like China and other "strangely" spelled (in their language) countries who may sound very foreign to international collectors if spelled correctly in their tongue (on the slabs or in the international catalogues).

 

So like I said, I don't think there is any wrongdoing or bad intend with the slabs not being printed with the correct wording (ZAR in this case) - I think its more a case of trying to please the international collecting community.

 

What do other coin collectors think?

 

Pierre

[jwither 12]

Pierre is correct. NGC does not bother to label origin with the name of the country, kingdom or political jurisdiction from history most of the time. Sometimes yes, but mostly no.

 

But I believe the main reason is not because of historical ignorance necessarily but because they label coins the same way the catalogues do. For most "world" coins, NGC and PCGS use the Krause catalog which attributes coins after 1500.. They only use "local" catalogs such as Hern when the item to be graded is not in it. And in Krause, there is no ZAR.

 

Examples of coins they do label with historical accuracy are ancient Rome and Greece, Parthia and Byzantine. But I do not believe they label most European coinage correctly under this standard, though I cannot tell you whcih ones they do and which they do not without checking both the catalogues and the census.