East Africa - KHN Mint Mark

Hi all,

I have this 1 shilling and just wanted a second opinion on the mintmark please - it looks to me like it says KHN. 

Thanks as always!

No, simply K (space) N.

N#5151

The photos of the Mintmark on the Numista page are fuzzy and not very helpful as well. 

Compare to this  MS63 without mintmark: 

Sorry, I made an M instead of the N but you get the idea.

Yep, that is a KHN. According to NGC:

The KHN mint marks exist because the master dies were produced with both the KN and H mint marks for use at either mint. Each mint was required to remove the other's mint mark before striking, but this was not always meticulously done. When one or the other mint mark was not fully removed a weak trace would remain creating the appearance of a wide space K N with a weak H in the middle or an H flanked by a weak K and N, in the field below the lion.

I've seen similar explanations elsewhere.

I have more than once wanted to hit the person whose idea this was for making it so hard to read.

 Though this topic is for a 1 Shilling coin, 

there were these 50 Cents topics with KHN mentioned, 

so it exists on other coins: 

https://en.numista.com/forum/topic95955.html 

https://en.numista.com/forum/topic84829.html 

ZacUK

 Though this topic is for a 1 Shilling coin, 

there were these 50 Cents topics with KHN mentioned, 

so it exists on other coins: 

https://en.numista.com/forum/topic95955.html 

https://en.numista.com/forum/topic84829.html 

The NGC link and quote above is for the 50 Cents coin.  NGC does not have that information for the 1 Shilling coin and does not recognize the KHN mint mark.

I apologize for the confusion I caused by copying the text from the 50 Cent NGC. I didn't check carefully enough when I found a search result.

(There are several other discussions about KHN in Numista forums, but the only coin from East Africa mentioned explicitly seems to be the 50 cent coin. One post mentioned British West Africa, but no BWA Numista listings are found when I search for KHN.)

(Edited to add link to the BWA post.)

Exactly, their is no mistaking an H on the certified example I showed of the one Schilling coin. The wear and dings on the OP's circulated coin could easily be erroneously interpreted as to what people are actually looking at. Having said that, I would like to see a photo of the other side as well.