WHAT DO YOU THINK THIS WAS USED FOR?

i was browsing when i found this coin in NumisBids, they say the coin was used as a shaped token/game piece:
Lot 539

Magnentius. AD 350-353. Æ Centenionalis (18mm, 4.16 g, 6h). Converted into a gaming token(?). Uncertain mint. Bareheaded, draped, and cuirassed bust right / Large Christogram; A-ω flanking. Brown patina, reddish earthen encrustation, cut into a cog-shaped token/game piece. Fine. Interesting contemporary use of a mid 4th century Roman Bronze coin.

Thomas,

 

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Probably someone bored of plowing fields mangled it and bought bread

 

Welcome to the CT Ancients Forum, @Thomas c ! That’s an interesting piece. My first thought was that it was currency from a mobile military field mint to pay garrison troops but the gaming token theory sounds good too.

I always liked serrated edge (bottle cap) coins.

 

A bottle top from an ancient coca cola bottle

 

Have any In your collection?(bottle)

 

A Chi Rho Christo gram on a gaming token? I wonder what that says about the odds of winning improving. I would have chosen a coin with Tyche or Fortuna but by Magnentius I guess the times were a'changing.

 

It's a legitimate coin, but the serrations were added later. Here's what it looked like initially:
https://www.acsearch.info/search.html?id=5992664

As for what the reason was for the alteration, well, that's anyone's guess. But a gaming token is certainly possible. It would be reasonable to assume that the serrations were added much later, after the coin had lost its official recognition of value and was no longer accepted for payment by merchants or the government.

 

I have a 1983 Super Bowl bottle with 36 year old Coca-Cola inside

 

When u s large cents are done like this they were used to crimp pies. I don't know if ancients made pies or P-zones like Pizza Hut sells. Cool piece.

 

I suspect there was a utilitarian use, as @harley bissell proposes.


Williams Sonoma Fluted Pastry Cutter

Here is a coin with similar edge markings, an extremely rare bronze of Bukara or Paykend:

Bukhara Soghd, circa 720 AD, AE, Paykend/Paikend, 18mm
Obv: facing head
Rev: dancing man tamgha.
cf. Central Asia » Soghd » Bukhara 'Dancing man' tamgha
cf. http://orientalnumismaticsociety.org/JONS/Files/ONS_158.pdf

There were no coins in this shape issued in the same century and no reason to make this look like a centuries-earlier distantly issued coin.

 

On second thought it looks like the crimps around RAVIOLI.

 

Very interesting. Use as a gaming or token piece is as good a theory as any.