How did chopmarks validate coins?

My guess is it matters if it’s a well known assayer.

For example if I handed you a blank planchet and told you it was 1 oz of .999 silver you might doubt that it’s real.

But if that 1 oz planchet is minted as an American Silver Eagle it’s going to be recognized world wide as authentic .999 fine silver.

Im just wondering about the test cuts with no indication of who made them.

 

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It did not matter who did the chopmark or assay or whatever. Counterfeiters are smart and still continue to exist today. One cannot be complacent and take everything as face value. Take for instance plated tungsten panda bullion. What's stopping counterfeiters making gold plated tungsten liberty coins???

 

You are confusing things. A chopmark is not a test cut.

A chopmark is a chop, a Chinese identification stamp. Small, hurriedly done, and thus possibly hard to read, but signed nevertheless. If the jeweler in the town, two money lenders and the owner of the big dry goods store all say it's good - Who are you to argue with them?

Then it gets to your town and the same thing happens.
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Ah ok that’s my bad. I thought they were the same thing but that one was just less advanced due to being 5th century BC compared to the 19th century.

So then what is the purpose of a test cut? How does it validate a coin’s purity? Like what exactly were the people looking for when they made a test cut?

Is it that silver is softer and counterfeits made of harder metals that can’t be cut so easily?

 

@Gam3rBlake

The ancients may not have had electroplating technology, but they certainly had chemical ways of enriching the surface, see Silver wash? (forumancientcoins.com)

A test cut shows that the coin isn't silver over a base metal. It doesn't tell you WHAT that metal is (could be low purity silver billion and it still looks silver).

Better testing, such as a specific gravity test was certainly within capabilities by the time of steam-pressed coins which are the chopmarked trade dollars.

You are seeing the eternal race between counterfeiting and the genuine item - better counterfeits <=> better tech. Which comes first is a bit of chicken/egg.

 

And we went a step further in 1965, didn't we? History repeats itself...

 

No, the test cut just displays the underlying metal or lack thereof. BTW, people biting on a gold coin was not to see if they could leave toothmarks to show it was real, if it left toothmarks, it was probably lead.

 

Mostly a chopmark doesn't confirm...it's more an indication that someone did decide they confirmed it. Maybe a local trusted merchant many years ago who weighed the coin for verification for example.

Many chopmarks don't actually dig through the metal but just indent it...some chopmarks literally chop it and expose some of what's beneath.

I do believe many chopmarks were simply made by local merchants so that no one questioned their coinage.

 

Bankers' marks are fairly common on Achaemenid Persian silver. Here's one with three separate bankers' marks on the obverse, c.375-340 BC:

Similar marks also show up on many Indian silver coins, where they are known as shroff marks ("shroff" was a Hindi word for a money-changer, as they were the ones who tested and confirmed coins). There are several shroff marks on both obverse and reverse of this silver rupee from the Indian Princely State of Arcot, late 18th century:

 

Yup! I know what you mean.

This denarius of Septimius Severus is only ~50% silver but if you tried to guess just by looking at it you’d assume it was just as high of purity as the 90% silver denarii.