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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;lehmansterms, post: 2488536, member: 80804&quot;]Your new coin is very attractive - however, calling the old one a &quot;forgery&quot; is a bit of a misnomer. Actually, so is the name by which this class of piece is known - &quot;Limes Denarius&quot; - since this name is a conflation of the <i>LIMES FALSA</i> British and Gallic underweight copies of 1st century BC and AD Æ - mainly Asses, with the obvious intention of the creators to make as close a copy as possible of a denarius. These tend to come from the Balkans.&nbsp; They used to be (I&#039;m talking 70&#039;s/80&#039;s here) a fairly scarce curiosity. In recent years they have become quite common. The numbers in which they exist alone tends to rule out any sort of &quot;counterfeiting&quot;. The actual reason for these low-grade billon (sometimes silvered) pieces to exist is unknown, but in the quantities in which they are now known, they must have circulated side-by-side with or been a replacement for regal coin.&nbsp; Perhaps they were a stopgap measure to make up for insufficient supplies of regal coin from the Empire in order that trade not be overly depressed by lack of coin. Some have theorized that these were created as a sort of military &quot;scrip&quot; - to be redeemed for good coin at some later date, but good enough for the soldiers&#039; uses until then, and as a way to keep invaders from capturing amounts of currency sufficient to cause economic problems. </p><p>The fact of the matter is we don&#039;t really know why they exist, or why they exist in such great numbers, but they really don&#039;t fit the profile for &quot;forgeries&quot;, ie: counterfeits made to deceive.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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