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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;Severus Alexander, post: 2769668, member: 84744&quot;]Wow, thanks for all the thoughtful comments and the beautiful coins! ([USER=31620]@maridvnvm[/USER]&#039;s stupendous heads-on-platters, love that toning [USER=79017]@Andres2[/USER] [but isn&#039;t that Galerius?], and Doug&#039;s Domna tet with the quadriga particularly stand out for me.)</p><p><br /></p><p>Some thoughts on the toning question: [USER=77077]@Theodosius[/USER] is surely right that these coins were never patinated.&nbsp; So is it 1800-year-old toning, or century retoning? I&#039;m still leaning towards the latter, although your various arguments have got me if not sitting on the fence, then busy climbing it. </p><p><br /></p><p>Why do I still lean towards retoning?&nbsp; (Besides the backfire effect!) The toning on the Dattari folles and antoniniani is quite unusual, departing from the norm even for the Alexandria mint. If it was just a function of the dryness in Egypt (though note that Alexandria itself is far from dry!), you&#039;d expect to see this on more coins from there. Or if it was characteristic of a certain sealed hoard found in special conditions, you wouldn&#039;t expect so many of Dattari&#039;s coins to have it. (Unless most of his folles and antoniniani did indeed come from a particular hoard. But that seems unlikely.) Instead, I think he bought unpatinated coins with thin, even brown toning–coins that most people wouldn&#039;t think of cleaning–and cleaned them. That would explain the prevalence in his collection of the iridescent coppery toning, and its scarcity otherwise.</p><p><br /></p><p>So what about all the Dattari tets that lack this toning? Hmmm... good point! Here&#039;s a stab at an explanation: the fabric of Alexandrian tets is very different from the ants and folles, and doesn&#039;t lend itself to being corrosion free for 1800 years. Since they lacked the smooth brown surfaces, maybe Dattari typically treated them differently.&nbsp; Or even if he treated them the same (as noted, some of them do seem to have been cleaned down to bare metal; CNG sold a whole bunch like this over a decade ago), their different fabric meant they didn&#039;t retone in the same way.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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