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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;dougsmit, post: 808680, member: 19463&quot;]Currently there is a thread on this board asking for folks to show off their gold.&nbsp; My gold doesn&#039;t fit in that group so I started a new thread.&nbsp; Coin collectors are famous for showing off their biggest and finest coins with pride.&nbsp; Ocassionally we even see someone asking what is the smallest coin.&nbsp; Frequently we see Indian Fanams touted as tiny but my pathetic remnant of a coin here makes them look like the mother lode when it comes to gold content. </p><p><br /></p><p>This bronze coin of Kaleb 520-540 AD from Aksum was issued to carry a tiny speck of gold on the reverse making the coin actually worth the face value at which it circulated.&nbsp; Gold coins have a way of being worth too much to be useful in daily trade unless they are so small that they are impractical.&nbsp; Aksum came up with a novel answer to the problem perhaps better than alloying the metal so no one would know it was there.&nbsp; They also have normal, larger pure gold coins but this one weighing only 0.4g copper included has to be in the running for the least gold to circulate as a coin. </p><p><img src="http://www.pbase.com/dougsmit/image/121825969.jpg" class="bbCodeImage wysiwygImage" alt="" unselectable="on" /></p><p>Aksum, by the way, also stands out for being an ancient African coin issuing authority.&nbsp; Becoming Christian slightly before Constantine in Rome, kings of Aksum often have a cross as the reverse type.&nbsp; Nice ones are not easy to find.&nbsp; This one is not very nice but its gold is still hanging on.</p><p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aksumite_Empire" target="_blank" class="externalLink ProxyLink" data-proxy-href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aksumite_Empire" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aksumite_Empire</a>[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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