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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;Fugio1, post: 3170439, member: 89970&quot;]First of all <u>[USER=97383]@Al Kowsky[/USER]</u>, lovely example of the wheel symbol denarius, the first Roman Republican serratus issue.&nbsp; &nbsp;&nbsp; The purpose of the serrations and the method of application remains a mystery.&nbsp; &nbsp; Michael Harlan in his book &quot;Roman Republican Moneyers and their Coins 81 BCE-64 BCE&quot; suggested that the serrations were done to prevent the mint workers from swallowing the coins for later retrieval.&nbsp;&nbsp; This makes much more sense to me than any other explanation including the discouragement of counterfeiting.</p><p><br /></p><p>As for the technique to apply the serrations,&nbsp; I believe it is implausible that these were hand applied with a chisel.&nbsp; Millions of serrated coins were produced in some large issues.&nbsp; The cost in time to produce these serrations with a chisel would be many multiples of the time to produce the same number of coins without the serrations - Even considering plentiful slave labor, it doesn&#039;t make sense to me that the mint would use that labor resource for this purpose unless there was a way to create the serrations rapidly.&nbsp; Perhaps there was some sort of a primitive machine&nbsp; to apply these serrations to the blank flans prior to striking.&nbsp;&nbsp; With any machine application, comes some level of repeatability.&nbsp; If the serrations were created with a machine, there would exist some coins with identical serrations.&nbsp;&nbsp; I have not found any, and I know of no studies that have pursued this.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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