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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;CarthaginianAmbassador, post: 8289315, member: 137835&quot;]I do not personally own any halved coins, but I happen to know a little bit about this phenomenon. </p><p><br /></p><p>Prior to coinage becoming widespread, many cultures bartered with boullion. As needed, you could snip off a piece to pay someone. There were lots of formats for this, but rings are convenient to carry around and do double duty as a statement about your personal wealth. Compare with Chinese knife money or Thracian &#039;dolphin money&#039; (most adorable format IMO), and the ring seems more easily cut - and they seemingly did it a lot.</p><p><br /></p><p>Thracian dolphin money are prone to &#039;false&#039; cuts, because the casting process would often snap off the tips of their tails, which gives the impression of a deliberate break. Apparently they would cast them in a tree-shape with the dolphins connected by the tail to the sprue. </p><p><br /></p><p><img src="https://mrbcoins.com/images/dolphin.jpg" class="bbCodeImage wysiwygImage" alt="" unselectable="on" /> </p><p><br /></p><p>Example, from Marc Breitsprecher. Sadly not mine.</p><p><a href="https://mrbcoins.com/cgi-bin/category.pl?id=79" target="_blank" class="externalLink ProxyLink" data-proxy-href="https://mrbcoins.com/cgi-bin/category.pl?id=79" rel="nofollow">https://mrbcoins.com/cgi-bin/category.pl?id=79</a></p><p><br /></p><p>Presumably cutting coins it grew directly out of this earlier boullion economy, and just persisted when denominational coin exchanging wasn&#039;t convenient.</p><p><br /></p><p>Cuts are just fun. Gets you thinking about what the coin bought. And where the missing piece went![/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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