Crying

Got my first umayuad dirham finally and I broke it while removing it from the flip. Didnt expect it to be so brittle (



Thank god for epoxy though. The coin will live with the scar though.



Umayyad dirham, 113AH, wasit mint

 

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That's what happened to me while cleaning them. They are thin. Anyway "Better scarred than nothing". Good luck.

 

Bought these four coins together some years ago: Ostrogoth siliquae of Sirmium, 508-528 AD. They already looked like this, but since I have them, two have lost some extra slivers of silver. Yes, very brittle.

 

Glued but not forgotten. I don't mind at all-get another if you can!

Rare post-Sullan Newstyle
Athens New Style Tetradrachm c 83/2 BC
Obs : Athena Parthenos right in tri-form helmet
29 mm 16.82 gm Thompson issue 82 Thompson catalogue:ll69a
Rev : ΑΘΕ ethnic
Owl standing on overturned panathenaic amphora
on which month mark Θ control ΔI below
2 magistrates : ARCHITIMOS DEMETRI
RF symbol : Isis
All surrounded by an olive wreath

 

What causes these coins to become so brittle?

 

Well THAT is a BUMMER! Great job with your repair... Nice coin.

Me, well, I did not think epoxy...

Do you think THIS might work?

 

You would expect the two pieces would line up perfectly together. There must have been internal stress in the metal caused by striking. Once the two halves were separated from each other they could return to a lower stress shape thus causing them to not fit together very well. You would think after 1900 years the stress would have been relieved by annealing by now.

 

The only time this happened to me was when I took a Constantius II centenionalis out of the flip and it snapped in half, turned out to be corrosion in the center of the coin which was not apparent on the surface.

 

Beautiful coin. It's a shame this poor fella broke in transit:

 

Wow, that sucks. I would be upset.

I had a sasanian coin that was Ok when I bought it & when it arrived, it was worse off looking then @Ryro example, ended up sending it back for a refund.

I can live with many problems on a coin, but one that is in pieces, I draw the line on that.

 

Rather than glue them I would place the parts as closely together as I could place them in a round and allow them to be as original as possible. May not make sense but its only my opinion. Be safe and healthy wear a mask...

 

what material are they made of?

 

That's always a shame when a coin breaks or gets damaged in our care.

I once bought a large lot containing a number of late Sassanian drachms and early Islamic dirhams. They came wrapped in bubble wrap but all together in a zip lock bag, which had nearly half a coin's worth of silver chips and dust left when I removed the coins

 

Unfortunate Muhammad. You did appear to make the best of it.
I had a similar experience when I purchased some ancient Chinese coins from a long time trusted dealer. One of those coins, which appeared to be carefully packed and protected in the mailer envelope was broken in two pieces, similar to yours. The fracture plane indicated an old dull partial fracture, and a new shiny fracture plane in the thickness of the coin.This was the first such case that a coin arrived damaged from this seller. I emailed him, advising him of the problem. He asked me to return it and he promptly returned a duplicate of that coin.

 

This one is broke and missing the other half.Ironically, the break cuts away literally all of the text on the coin. RIP

 

Serious, Serious condolences.
Something only worse happened to me with the first Louis I temple denier I ever got. Arrived intact, but promptly shattered. It was totally crystallized. ...Nope, no pics ...although the pieces are still around, in an envelope, somewhere. RIP.
Does what happened to you, and all these other folks, represent a less severe case, or an earlier stage, of the same process?
Thanks, Theodosious and Ancient Coin Hunter, for your elicidation in this regard. But the notion that such things can be completely independent of crystallization, even as a factor, is totally new to me.

 

...Gives that much more resonance to the description you run into from dealers, "Good Metal."
Right, along with crystallization of silver, I'm dimly acquainted with 'bronze disease.' But I'm really not up to speed with the whole range of stuff like this that you can run into.

 

Another way to look at your coin, taking a very long term view is that, when it is discovered in an archaeological dig site in the year 5052, it will be touted as "an unique discovery of an Islamic silver dirham, repaired during the Petro-chemical Age with epoxy - an unique find!"

 

I bet that would blow their minds, honestly. Good luck explaining that to the Mainstream Science of the 6th Millenium!

 

I have a Sassanian dirham like that. Someone must have needed some small change.