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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;Silverlock, post: 3200657, member: 98181&quot;]My wife isn’t a collector of anything but dogs, but she politely oohs and aahs when I show her my latest acquisition for one of my collections. The only thing she’s <b>entirely</b> unimpressed by are early Greek factions — I suspect it’s because she needs her reading glasses to see them. Unfortunately, early Greek coins happen to be my coin collecting focus. So when this arrived in the mail today, instead of an ooh or an aah, or even one of those smiles suggesting she’s thinking she should have married one of her other options, all I got were laughs:</p><p><br /></p><p>[ATTACH=full]828308[/ATTACH] </p><p><br /></p><p>[ATTACH=full]828307[/ATTACH] </p><p><br /></p><p>Unstruck silver coin flan for hemitetartemorion</p><p>3 mm</p><p>0.113 grams</p><p><br /></p><p>I’ve never seen an unstruck ancient coin flan, so this got my attention. Coming to ancients from US error coins, a blank planchette really got my attention. To give you an idea of how tiny this thing is, here it is next to a Caria, Ionia 5th century bull tetartemorion at 0.145 grams, a Persis 2nd century Mithra hemidrachm at 14 mm and 1.48 grams, and a US penny.</p><p><br /></p><p>[ATTACH=full]828309[/ATTACH] </p><p><br /></p><p>One reason I collect early Greek coins is because I am astounded that they were able to carve a die that minute without the aid of a magnifying glass. It seems impossible, all the more so because many times I can’t even see the design without a magnifying glass. And to think people conducted business with coins this small is astounding. In the days before cheap finely woven linens, accurate scales, and pockets, how did this even work? How did they get the coin to the agora? How wasn’t it lost passing from one hand to another? How did it even make it out of the house? How did it even make it to the house?</p><p><br /></p><p>At 3 mm this is my smallest collectible. Please share your smallest coin that could be made from a flan such as this. And if you have an unstruck flan, of any size, I’d really like to see it.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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