Ancient coins were struck from dies individually cut by hand without the use of mechanical duplication as is done today. Large issues of coins might have had hundreds of dies with some rare coins all come from one die set. It is slightly unusual to find more than one coin struck from the same dies but with searching, it can be done. My photo shows something a bit more unusual. The six coins (Septimius Severus, Emesa mint 194 AD) were all struck from the same obverse die but all six reverses are different types. It appears the mint was rotating reverses between obverses. My suspicion is that the two dies were secured separately at night so no one person would have access to both dies needed to strike coins unofficially but I have no proof of this theory. Relatively few collectors pay much attention to die identity. I'm unusual. I hope to add others to this set of six but that will require luck. Six is nowhere close to a record for this sort of thing as I am aware of one obverse die of Septimius Severus that is known with at least a dozen reverses (some of the same type but different dies). If any of you have a coin using this obverse die, I would love to hear of it. Its distinctive marks are a stray line in the L at obverse left and the rather weakly cut nose on the portrait. After you look at enough of these things, some dies become familiar making it easier to find matches. Most of us collect ancients generally but after a while many develop specialty interests. Some specialize in owning mint state coins. I can't be that picky on grade if I am to find the dies I seek. I began being interested in Septimius Severus Eastern mint denarii in the mid-1960's. Finding these six required looking at thousands of coins.
Wowser! Interesting... and 12 is the record. Well, Mint procedures are revealed a bit by this. Thank you, Smitty, for the lesson.
Another contributing factor is the die position. There is a disparity in life between the die placed in the anvil, usually the obverse, which lasts longer, and the die in the punch, usually the reverse die, which break more quickly. Because they are embedded in an anvil, obverse dies tend to outlast reverse (punch) dies by a factor of seven or eight to one. I know you know this already because you mentioned it on your site on this page under the Corinth stater. "In most cases, the more important type was placed on the obverse and given the anvil position (anvil dies lasted longer than punch dies)."
While I certainly agree that reverse dies had a shorter life than obverse, I don't believe it was anything like 7-8 times as much. The rules changed between Corinth and Rome. In later Roman, there is evidence that some mints alternated reverse dies in use on the same obverse to the point of every other coin. There are various theories but one is that the reverse die was allowed to cool in this way and would last longer. We can study the evidence and come up with theories that point to mint practices but we have to be aware of the chance that anything we prove for 194 AD in Emesa might hold for no other time or place. I have handled more coins or this mint and date than any other and have seen several examples of multiple partnering. One is even noteworthy because the obverse die was badly damaged (making it easy to spot even by those not familiar with the series). I suspect that portrait dies were very precious objects and were treated as well as possible to keep them in use for as long as possible.
Good points, everyone. I respect anyone who can remember that the obverse die is usually on the anvil while the reverse die is on the punch. (Although I think the ratio to obverse to reverse is a little high, your point is well made.) I admire anyone who has the patience and knowledge to study die linkages. Unfortunately (or fortunately ), I'm not one of them. Keep up the good work. guy
To a purist, the obverse dies is always the anvil die (lower position). That means some coins were struck with a head on the tails side and something else on heads. Corinthian staters have Pegasus (flying horse) on the obverse and a head of Athena on the reverse. At Syracuse, tetradrachms have a chariot on the obverse and a head on the reverse. Obviously many people don't agree with this and you will see them sold with either side shown on the left in the image. The are even a few Antonine period bronzes which show a cupped field on the portrait and flatter obverse field suggesting that they were struck with portrait on the punch. Even the purists usually call the head on these obverse. Not all of us are consistent.
Your point is well taken that the process may have changed from Greek to Roman times. But just by coincidence I just read a post about an Alexander the Great tetradrachm that had 7 reverses paired to one obverse. See Barry Murphy's post second one down here. So I didn't have to go far to find an example. And while that many reverses paired to an obverse isn't the rule. It certainly happened. So the question is, were they rotating dies or did the obverse just outlast that many reverses? But if they were rotating as a rule wouldn't we see that for almost all obverses? Since you have experience with them, my question to you is - With the Septimius Severus Eastern mint denarii, do you see consistently high reverse dies paired to obverses? Or only in the example you posted? The answer to that would seem to point to whether rotating dies was a standard practice at that mint and time, or not. Just for the sake of clarity. When I wrote: I should have said instead that obverse dies can outlast reverse dies by a factor of seven or eight. I didn't mean to sound as if they all did, because of course they certainly didn't.
I don't have the experience with these to give meaningful answers but my amateur observation is that it is not hard to find Emesa examples of more than one reverse with an obverse so it probably points to a mint practice. What I do not see is chaining of obverse and reverse dies as seen in Syracuse where you find an obverse replaced in the middle of a reverse die life: o1/r1, o1/r2, o1/r3, o2/r3, o2/r4 etc. It has not been as easy for me to find a reverse die used with two obverses. If the dies were used sequentially I would expect to see deterioration of the obverse so that one of the six of my coins might show a seriously faulted obverse die compared to another with a fresh one. I don't pretend to understand the pattern but am more likely to tend toward something like three dies used in rotation by the day shift and three different ones used by the night shift (I have absolutely no reason to believe the mint worked shifts - this is just an example of a pattern that would explain so many reverse dies). I also lack coins showing use of dies until failure. Perhaps these dies were not used long enough to show deterioration and failure but made in sets with the intent of producing a larger variety of reverses? We can not assume that the only reason for replacing a die is that it was worn out. I also find it interesting that I found my six different reverses but have not taken note of an example of this obverse die used with a second reverse die matching the type of one of mine. I saw others that were die duplicates (both sides) but not a second, different, for example, Victory walking die. Note my other Victory is standing on a globe rather than walking so the two Victories are not matching. Perhaps this only means I did not look carefully enough at enough coins. Whoever makes sense of all this will have to study a thousand times as many coins as I have seen; they will need to keep careful notes and employ scientific methods to do a full die study. Who has the resources, intellect and inclination to do this for these little coins?
Could the die life of the reverse have something to do with the Roman "invention" of hinged dies? I thought most Greeks were struck with a hand punch for the reverse, and anyone who has done something like this knows that this punch will break fairly quickly. With a hinged punch, you take away the variability of strike location, therefor allowing the reverse punch to have a longer lifespan, though of course not nearly as long as the stationary die embedded into a mass.
I was under the opinion that hinged dies did not start until later (Gallic Empire period???). They certainly were not used at Emesa where variation of alignment is the norm. I know next to nothing about later Roman mint practices.
I will try to research further. Remember that even with hinged dies flan position is not set like it is in mechanical minting, so positioning can still get off. Interesting topic. Does anyone know of a book studying these issues?
