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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;red_spork, post: 7956438, member: 74282&quot;]That is correct - your coin, like figure 12, is a Crawford 53/1, one of the largest groups of anonymous victoriati.</p><p><br /></p><p>As far as 1 oz of silver vs 1 oz of coins, that, like most questions regarding ancient coins, has different answers in different places and at different times. In Spain for instance, particularly prior to Roman domination of the Iberian peninsula, it seems like coins were basically treated similar to bullion, often coins were even cut into fragments for smaller transactions. They also just used bits of silver(&quot;hacksilber&quot;) that had never been coins. The vikings had similar practices, as did some parts of the Achaemenid empire. You look at something like Athens on the other hand and they had system where private individuals could exclusively mine parts of the Laurion mines themselves and, if they wished, bring back the silver to Athens to be minted into owls. I am no expert on coins or history of this period, but my understanding was that if you brought in a given amount of silver, you&#039;d get back a pile of owls weighing about 90% or so of the original weight, both due to production costs and the city-state taking a bit off the top. That&#039;s known as <i>seigniorage</i> and you can find many places discussing that online, but it does suggest that a coin was worth more than just its silver bullion value.</p><p><br /></p><p>As far as &quot;micro mints&quot;, tons of Greek cities all across the Mediterranean had their own mints for making coins. Fast forward to Roman times, and when Roman coinage really took off, during the Second Punic War, the Romans had the main Rome mint plus many mints scattered across Italy(including the islands of Sardinia and Sicily), Spain and even the Greek island of Corfu. These mints operated at different times in all these different places based on the needs of the armies mostly. Afterwards the Romans largely minted coins in the Rome mint however, particularly in the 1st century BC, they tolerated any even possibly encouraged the private minting of bronze small change coins, though they kept the minting of silver and gold largely in-house(though Sulla and the various Imperators, among others, minted silver and gold in the field).[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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