Have you ever wondered how people counted tiny coins back in the day?!

This is a specialized board to count this particular coin from India (19th century Travancore Chukram), the person would just dump a bunch Chukrams and spread it over the board to get 100 Chukrams per spread, rather than tediously counting tiny coins! while this coin is no way ancient it's still appropriate for coins like ancient tiny Greek silvers. I guess people would've also just weigh the coins rather than count them like cavemen

 

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Where is the reject bin??
Seriously though that's pretty cool. How old is this board? It has to be worth something on it's own?

 

I'm pretty sure this is not older than 200-300 years! but I found this picture on an Indian coin dealer's fb page as a cool fact, and not for sale.

 

you can find depictions of counting boards on Roman coins associated with Liberalitas

 

Super cool! I've never seen a surviving example of one of these like this. I mentioned them very briefly (really only included a quote about them) in my thread about the small gold fanams of the south Indian coast. It's cool to see one like this holding a few coins.

 

That's cool, @JayAg47 ! Here's a Liberalitas coin in my collection depicting a counting board.


Commodus, AD 177-192.
Roman AR denarius, 3.42 g, 18 mm, 12 h.
Rome, AD 180.
Obv: M COMMODVS ANTONINVS AVG, laureate and cuirassed bust right.
Rev: LIB AVG TR P V IMP IIII COS II P P, Liberalitas standing left, holding tessera and cornucopiae.
Refs: RIC 10a; Cohen 301; BMC 4.

 

That is a really cool counting board for chucking chukrams.

As Victor and RC note, Roman coins showed these coin-counters fairly regularly, usually with the goddess Liberalitas (sometimes called an abacus in descriptions, but I think this is an error).

From a FORVM listing:

"Liberalitas coin types attest to occasions when the emperor has displayed his generosity towards the people by a distribution to them of money, provisions, or both. The first mention of Liberalitas was on coins of Hadrian. It was a type frequently repeated by the succeeding emperors. Indeed these instances of imperial generosity are more carefully recorded on coins than they are by history. Liberality is personified by the image of a woman, holding in one hand a counting board, or square tablet with a handle on which are cut a certain number of holes. These boards were used to quickly count the proper number of coins or other items for distribution to each person. In the other hand she holds a cornucopia, to indicate the prosperity of the state and the abundance of wheat contained in the public graineries."
https://www.forumancientcoins.com/c...fld=https://www.forumancientcoins.com/Coins2/

Here is a sestertius - you can just make out the coins/holes in the coin-counter:



Severus Alexander Æ Sestertius
(229 A.D.)
Rome Mint
IMP SEV ALEXANDER AVG, laureate head right, draped left shoulder / LIBERALITAS AVGVSTI IIII, S-C, Liberalitas standing left, holding counter and cornucopiae.
RIC 575; Cohen 136; BMC 561.
(14.33 grams / 28 mm)

 

Very interesting. I'm still stumped by the purchasing power of later debased antoniniani and late roman AE4's. Must have needed bags of the coins to buy anything. Not unlike the mark during the time of the Weimar Republic.

 

Bags of coins indeed!

From Wikipedia:

"In the past the word 'follis' was used to describe a large bronze Roman coin introduced in about 294 (the actual name of this coin is unknown [1]) at the time of the coinage reform of Diocletian. It weighed about 10 grams and was about 4% silver, mostly as a thin layer on the surface. However, later studies have shown that this is wrong, and that this coin may have been known as a 'nummus'. The word follis means bag (usually made of leather) in Latin, and there is evidence that this term was used in antiquity for a sealed bag containing a specific amount of coinage...."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Follis

 

By the time of the later empire it seems like many transactions were handled by way of sealed bags containing conventional amounts of coins -- such a bag was known to the Romans as the follis (the use of this word to refer to individual coins is a long-established error, as I understand it).

On one of the mosaics at the Villa Romana del Casale we see two sealed bags labelled which is taken to be an abbreviation of 12,500 denarii -- i.e. 12,500 denarii worth of base-metal or silver coins. Presumably the former.



We see a few labelled bags in the Chronography of 354 as well:

∞ = 1,000

∞CCCC = 400,000(?)

 

Haha - bags and wheelbarrows filled with coins!

 

This tiny hammered silver from Hungary (Bela IV 1235-1270) is only 9mm diameter, and so light that it is hard to imagine that coins like this were not easily lost. Dealer's description:

HUNGARY
BÉLÁ IV
1235 - 1270 AD.
AR OBOLUS,

Obv: Castle bastion above crescent, lilies to left and right.,
Rev: Hebrew letter ח (Chet) in a floral wreath,
Hungary, 1235 - 1270 AD.
Huszár 307 (RR) 0.17g. aEF/VF

(I think the Hebrew letter, probably the initial of the Jewish minter, is actually on the other side.)

 

Cool! Can you parse out the symbols? I recognize XII, of course, but I don't know what to make of the first or last. (Edit: now I see that the "asterisk" is the symbol for denarius, although the machine I'm on at the moment doesn't want to render the Unicode version.)

I did run off and Google "Roman numerals one half", but that seemed to indicate they'd use S (semis) for one-half. (I didn't know that there were Roman numerals for fractions, never mind that they were base-twelve!)

 

Could cavemen count to 100...?

 

Man that coin board has to be special I have never seen anything like it before thanks for posting it along with your thread.

 

There were several sizes depending on the coin. I was unsuccessful on the following lot a few days ago, but I wasn't really trying hard either. It counts 100 and 200 chuckrams and one for 250 copper coins:

 

I have a couple of these coins. Here is an idea of how small they really are...

 

They used "digital" calculators. If they removed their sandals they had pedally enhanced calculators and could get up to twenty.

 

How did people carry such small coins?

 

In their mouths.