Ancient coins and the Bible

Determining the fineness of silver or gold by measuring specific gravity is an ancient technique. Vitruvius gives an account of Archimedes testing the fineness of the crown of Hieron of Syracuse in the 3rd-century BC.

The problem is, Archimedes' writings were not disseminated among his contemporaries - in fact, they did not come to light until the 6th-century AD. But the fact that he did measure the specific gravity of an object tells us that is was possible to do so in antiquity. Perhaps the Hebrews had their own version of Archimedes. Perhaps Archimedes was engaging in a technique that was already well-known in the ancient world.

Various sources, like the ones Christian posted above, give us tantalizing hints that the ancients were measuring not just weight, but specific gravity as well.

 

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The threat of death was a strong one, remember they did not have 1 lawyer per 100 population. You only got caught once..

 

I am just say'in they were not dummies back then. Man is a very intelligent and resourceful creature..until they become a politician.

 

And then they become less intelligent and more cunning and perhaps more resourceful!

 

Does the threat of death stop resolute criminals today? In fact, the Romans fed their counterfeiters to the beasts in the Colosseum, and yet there are plenty of ancient counterfeit coins to collect. I have a handful myself.

 

Today the threat does not exist. Sure there will always be criminals. Yet somehow, I think the consequences were more feared back then. Today at worse it is jail, or freedom like the Canadian guy..

 

Who incidentally made some of the worst counterfeit bills I've ever seen. I can't believe they fooled anyone.

 

Dang it Doug, you beat me to it. Yes, I have seen references shoowing touchstones recovered in ancient sites. In fact, in a coupke of cases they have found extremely worn ones and have tried to infer how busy the location was based upon how quickly a touchstone would wear by being rubbed with metal.

 

Yes, I think you mean James Burke's Connections. I wish I remembered in which episode he talks about touchstones. There's a bunch of them uploaded to youtube, but I don't have the time to watch them all.

 

Ah, I see. Nevertheless, there is a Connections episode which addresses assaying and the use of touchstones. I remember watching it, back in the day when TLC was actually worth watching.

 

Yeah, I stayed at Holiday Inn Express!

 

A good book on the subject, from a numismatic perspective, is King Croesus' Gold, Excavations at Sardis. My library is packed up of I would list the author.

 

Didn't German paper money have the penalty for counterfeiting printed right on it?

 

Sort of, yes. The old (pre-1990) notes had such a warning, the later ones (1990-2001) did not have it. Dutch gulden notes had a similar text, and Swiss banknotes also let you know that counterfeiting is illegal ...

Christian

 

I think that there is some confusion over the use of 'touch stones" and the karat needles. The process require strong acid. The touch stone process is mainly used for gold because of the common precious metals, only gold leaves a gold leaves a yellow streak. Silver leaves a silver color streak , but is easily confused with other metals such as nickel alloys, etc., and silver is what the discussion started out on. There are some studies on the net about surface nondestructive methods on ancient silver appearing artifacts , and the silver variation is rather large.

here is an article on touch stone analysis from GIA:

http://www.gia.edu/cs/Satellite?c=P...ail&cid=1363437689977&pagename=GST/Dispatcher