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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;lehmansterms, post: 2708553, member: 80804&quot;]We have a tendency to &quot;compress time&quot; when talking about &quot;the ancients&quot; - as though there were only 100 or so of them and they did everything all together on one afternoon ~2000 years ago (it was a Tuesday, I think...) and were done with it.&nbsp; You have to remember that &quot;ancient coins&quot; by even the most stringent definition of &quot;ancient&quot; were struck over a period of no less than 1000 years and, even considering only the coins of Classical Western Antiquity, they were struck in a huge number of places around the Mediterranean Basin.</p><p>Techniques for producing blanks and dies might vary from place to place at any given time since there was no broad dissemination of information about how mints worked.&nbsp; This was probably due to equal parts of it being a trade secret and the doings of slaves being beneath the notice of all but those intimately involved with slaves and directing their work. This makes out understanding of it all the more complex today, as well.</p><p>What was done in Athens in the 5th century BC when striking pure silver (as pure as the technology was able to refine) &quot;Owls&quot; was VASTLY different from what was being done in Trier or Rome or Siscia or Antioch in the 4th century AD., striking &quot;silvered&quot; billon coins which were meant to be more of a simple disc than the highly sculptural (and totally un-stackable) coins of an earlier era. </p><p>The process of creating blanks, how they were prepared for striking - and this is an important point, coin blanks were NOT heated red-hot and struck while hot to facilitate striking. Aside from it being impossible to maintain blanks in the narrow temperature band between solid and liquid (which is 100&#039;s of degrees with iron and only 10&#039;s of degrees in silver, copper, gold, etc) and even given some ability to control the temperature of blanks in a furnace adjacent to the anvil, it would be impossible to move them fast enough and strike them before they had cooled and re-hardened.&nbsp; Also, heating to that temperature would have created fire-scale on the surface of the blanks and would have seriously complicated the process of producing attractive coins.&nbsp; Blanks WERE heated before striking, but it was an annealing process to relieve the work hardening they had received in the process of being flattened from cast balls to more or less disc-shaped blanks.</p><p>The flans thus produced were then most likely &quot;pickled&quot; in an acid solution to remove any remaining fire-scale - and in the case of &quot;silvered billon&quot; to dissolve enough of the copper from the surface that when struck a silver-enriched surface resulted. </p><p>They would virtually invariably have been struck cold to facilitate handling and to reduce the heating of the dies which striking creates and which will make dies deteriorate and fail more quickly than if steps are taken to keep the dies cooler.</p><p>This is all at least modestly complex and dependent upon the level of technology available to each of the hundreds of coin-producing cultures and entities across the time-span of &quot;antiquity&quot;.</p><p>The large bronze or copper flans for some Hellenistic coins - like those of the Ptolemies and a great many of the Roman Provincial coins - were only struck after a relatively complex machining process to remove any debris and/or hardened metal from the flans&#039; surfaces, and in some cases to trim the edges as well - this left the little &quot;dimples&quot; in the centers of the coins which have puzzled so many as to how and why they were created.</p><p>I suppose I could go on at greater length here, but what I really wanted to impress on folks is the fact that &quot;the ancients&quot; didn&#039;t do anything one specific way, they did not have had the same fantastic rate of technological development which sometimes benefits us and under which we also often labor to keep up. They began with different situations and processes in hundreds of different places at hundreds of different times. Then technological improvements were adapted as they were were discovered - and in some cases abandoned as they were forgotten or found to be uneconomical. </p><p>The main point is antiquity didn&#039;t happen all at once or in any coherently contiguous area. Antiquity was an &quot;age&quot;, not an event, and the ancient &quot;participants&quot; were as different from place to place and time to time as any randomly chosen bunch of folks from various different countries over even just a couple of centuries would be today.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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