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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;TypeCoin971793, post: 3152510, member: 78244&quot;]About a year ago, I purchased a lot of many fragmented early round Chinese coins. The dealer advertised them as being likely fake, but I took the gamble ($20) and bought them.</p><p><br /></p><p>I have reassembled most of them (the one on the bottom-right is an ancient drinking game token, so it will not be descussed):</p><p><br /></p><p>[ATTACH=full]807897[/ATTACH]</p><p><br /></p><p>H-6.1: “Gong”, a city in the state of Liang</p><p><br /></p><p>[ATTACH=full]807898[/ATTACH]</p><p><br /></p><p>H-6.2: “Gong Tun Chi Jin”, “Gong Pure Red Metal”</p><p><br /></p><p>[ATTACH=full]807899[/ATTACH]</p><p><br /></p><p>H-6.2: “Gong Tun Chi Jin”, “Gong Pure Red Metal”</p><p><br /></p><p>[ATTACH=full]807900[/ATTACH]</p><p><br /></p><p>H-6.6: “Qi Yuan Yi Jin”, “Qiyuan One Jin”. Qiyuan was a city in the state of Liang</p><p><br /></p><p>[ATTACH=full]807901[/ATTACH]</p><p><br /></p><p>H-6.12: “Lin”, a city in the state of Zhao</p><p><br /></p><p>[ATTACH=full]807902[/ATTACH]</p><p><br /></p><p>H-6.26 or H-6.27: “Zhong Yi Liang Shi Er (Or “Shi” on H-6.27) Yi Zhu”, “Weight one Liang or 12 (Or “14”) Zhu”, state of Qin</p><p><br /></p><p>Also possibly H-7.2, an early “Ban Liang” with its characters reversed.</p><p><br /></p><p>[ATTACH=full]807904[/ATTACH]</p><p><br /></p><p>Observations:</p><p><br /></p><p>1. The metal along the breaks appeared crystallized.</p><p>2. During a test to see how brittle the metal was, a small protrusion was easily broken off with surprisingly little force.</p><p>3. Some of the breaks are new, some have oxidized (“toned”), and some were completely patinated. Some of the coins exhibited all three attributes.</p><p>4. All of the patinas look very similar.</p><p>5. The patina adjacent to the breaks had chipped away, revealing a thick, brittle layer of crust.</p><p>6. Several of the fragments had no metallic ring to them at all when dropped on a hard surface. This is indicative of crystallized metal.</p><p>7. Several of the breaks were very clean and showed no signs of bending. This is idicative of old, brittle metal</p><p>8. On the Lin coin, there were bends at the breaks. On these bends where the metal stretched, there was buckling. These bends were only a few millimeters long and extended only a fraction along the break.</p><p><br /></p><p>Analysis of the above observations:</p><p><br /></p><p>Old, brittle, non-resonant, crystallized metal is a very good sign. It means the coins have been in the ground for thousands of years. However, the fact that the patina looked the same on all of the coins made me doubtful. As stated above, these coins came from different regions and different states, but to have the same patina means that they were found in the same place. It seems highly unlikely that 6 different extremely rare varieties would be found in the same location, all shattered. From this I decided that these were likely fakes modified from genuine coins and repatinated in the same workshop. They either just happened to shatter during the process, or they were destroyed to render the fakes useless.</p><p><br /></p><p>I found these a couple days ago and decided to revisit them, focusing on the breaks themselves. This is when I noticed observations #3 and #8. For the breaks to have multiple states of patination (from freshly-broken to broken hundreds/thousands of years ago), the breaks can’t have happened at the same time. This renders my above theory incorrect. Building off of observation number 8, it appears that the “Lin” coin had been knicked by something sharp (a plow?) several times, causing the metal to be cut, buckle, and propagate a break down to the middle hole. The fact that the bend is only a small part of the break means that the coin was not broken by being forcibly bent. The breaking mechanism was isolated to the edges. The bends were in different locations and in different directions, suggesting the coin was moved about in the soil, which is consistent with the plow theory. The other coins do not show these cut marks, so it is possible they were deeper in the surface but still affected/broken by the soil movement. If these coins were broken into small pieces in the soil, that would explain why so many of the pieces are missing (eg. never recovered). While this does not make me 100% sure that these coins are genuine, their authenticity seems very highly plausible from the evidence.</p><p><br /></p><p>Perhaps these coins are the rejects from a hoard discovered while a farmer was plowing the field. Or maybe an ancient coin collector had hidden away his stash, only for it to get obliterated centuries later? I have no context for where and with what these coins were found, so there is no way to tell for certain.</p><p><br /></p><p>[USER=87271]@AnYangMan[/USER] is my analysis sound?[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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