Here I have a Antonius Pius Denarius that I just recently bought... anyone have any idea how it got scratched up like that? my first thought was cleaning, but that would have had to have been with a wire brush..lol: stainless
Gosh Stainless after 1800 years it could have been anything. From ancients scratching the silver with a knife to see if its real to a middle-ages kid playing a kind of shuffleboard game with it. Its a neat coin, with a history. Traci
My guess is wire brush cleaning but we used to throw around a term 'brick cleaned' which was a slam at archaeologists that would find a coin and rub it on a brick until they could make out the legends and date the coin. After all, a coin found tends to date a site and that information is much more valuable to one mindset than the coin itself. Considering some of the things some people do to uncleaned ancients, the wire brush seems mild. Consider also the possibility that the finder did not realize the lump of encrustation contained a soft silver coin rather than a more rugged bronze that he was accustomed to finding. Obviously this is a horridly abused coin but I have seen worse.
