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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;medoraman, post: 983711, member: 26302&quot;]As for researching ancient smelting techniques, the only book I have covering it is &quot;King Croesus&#039; Gold, Excavations at Sardis&quot;. It refers to the technique used at the mint of the first coins. They did have small droplets of gold recovered that they claimed were pure gold, but this was in very small quantities, (think tiniest droplet). For the coins, the &quot;pure gold&quot; coins were all in the 98-99% range, using scanning electron microscope as the measuring instrument. Basically it shows in tiny quantities ancients achieved pure gold, but it doesn&#039;t appear they could do so in large enough quantites for coin production. There is another publication measuring ancient greek coins and their fineness, but I do not have that volume. Maybe Doug Smith or someone else does. I read it years ago and I never saw anything over .99 if I remember correctly, usually less.</p><p><br /></p><p>As for the controversy, I really could go either way. In inorganic chemistry I remember gold does not like to bond with other elements, but will do so under certain situations. I could see a naturally occuring situation where gold could tone, like Doug describes, but I would be hard pressed to think those situations occurred often. Maybe its a situation where most toning is due to impurites, but on some gold it is the actual gold that has toned. I know this doesn&#039;t help much, and I would love to see more test results of the actual surface layer on the gold coins analyzed, (but thanks a lot for the OP article), but until then I believe both could be possible.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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