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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;dougsmit, post: 823687, member: 19463&quot;]Modern collectors moving to ancients often have trouble with the concept of each die being individually cut rather than being mass produced as clones of a master.&nbsp; Common coins may have been produced from hundreds of dies.&nbsp; Finding an &#039;exact&#039; match is not always to be expected unless your definition of &#039;exact&#039; is not so exact.&nbsp; Some issues even numbered the dies (open coding) but more often we find controls letters, legend spacing variations or dots here and there that may be intentional or may have just meant that the mint did not see any reason to make every die exactly like the last.&nbsp; Several different die cutters usually worked together on the same issue and students sometimes separate their works (by name if they signed the dies).&nbsp; </p><p><br /></p><p>In the case of this very common coin, the consistant things on the reverse are the sword and the word Amisoy.&nbsp; I am no student of the series and can not tell you the meaning of IB or the symbols half off the small flan at top and bottom.&nbsp; In this case it would be quite possible to have a coin from the same die that showed the bottom part of the design and lost the IB.&nbsp; Compare my example which is certainly a different die but may have the IB at top (possibly &#039;12&#039;???) and certainly shows a monogram (PLKK?) at the bottom mostly missing on your coin but probably on the die that produced it.</p><p><img src="http://www.pbase.com/image/122339410.jpg" class="bbCodeImage wysiwygImage" alt="" unselectable="on" /></p><p><br /></p><p>There may be someone out there who has done a die study of these coins but I have not seen it.&nbsp; The fact that our two coins are not identical does not mean that one or the other is wrong, it just means that they were not made by a modern minting technique that valued every coin being identical to thousands upon thousands others of the type.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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