Where there any big ancient coins produced? Not including key money, stone money, etc, just regular round coins. Be neat if they made a silver dollar sized ancient.
My largest is this Ptolemy II AE46 90.1g. It is large for a struck coin but the early Roman cast Aes Grave were larger.
You will never see a regular issue silver coin thaler sized, (size of a US silver dollar), in ancients. Silver was too precious. Heck, you never seen them anywhere in the world until the Joachimsthaler was introduced. It was only introduced because that area had huge silver mines and little access to gold. So their solution was to make huge silver coins. In many ways the US did the same with our massive mintage of Morgans. This was ONLY done because of the huge silver production coming out of the West. We had absolutely no need for these coins, they struck them and promptly put them in vaults since no one wanted them. In much the same way we have huge Ptolemaic bronzes. Egypt did not have silver mines, but had large copper mines, especially on Cyprus. So their colution was to strike huge copper coins instead of small silver one.
It was on the flan before the coin was struck. A lathe smoothed the cast flans, and left a center pivot. Then the coin was struck, but the larger the coin, the deeper the center pivot, and the more likely it did not get eliminated in the strike.
http://www.classicalcoins.com/flans1.html This is the first of 8 pages on the subject but those in a hurry may want to jump to pages 6,7 and 8.
Ptolemy II 48mm, shown with 5mm Macedon (Pangeion region) silver coin. Looks like Zeus Ammon is wearing a cute little monkey earring
