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<p>[QUOTE="lehmansterms, post: 3999366, member: 80804"]After about 265 B.C. the flans for almost all large (and quite a few of the small) coins made in Egypt - both Ptolemaic and the later Roman Provincial issues - underwent significant "manufacturing" processes. These skimmed-off the surface of the flan's faces removing any foreign matter picked up from the molds and setting-up a "fresh", non-hardened surface for striking. At the same time, although possibly with different machinery, any "flashing" around the edges where molds may not have met with 100% precision were also machined off.</p><p>The processes by which this was done left the small "centration dimples" which you see in these pieces (here and at other Provincial mints.)</p><p>There has been a large amount of speculation as to how this all was accomplished. The best theoretical reconstruction I have ever seen, plus an in-depth discussion can be seen on this website.</p><p><a href="http://www.classicalcoins.com/flans1.html" target="_blank" class="externalLink ProxyLink" data-proxy-href="http://www.classicalcoins.com/flans1.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.classicalcoins.com/flans1.html</a> </p><p>This all makes perfect mechanical sense, however (so far) no one has ever discovered a "mint of Pompeii". (This is a euphemism. Of course there was no mint in Pompeii or Herculaneum.) If there were a mint found somewhere which had been preserved whole with all its equipment, we might have artifact-based archeological evidence for the various operations. So we must rely upon theory and conjecture to reconstruct the procedures and machines in the absence of written records or preserved artifacts. The Romans were very good at dismantling their mints, evidently, since to the best of my knowledge, sites presumed to have been minting officinae are marked out by nothing more than the probable foundations of furnaces - everything else is long gone.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>
[QUOTE="lehmansterms, post: 3999366, member: 80804"]After about 265 B.C. the flans for almost all large (and quite a few of the small) coins made in Egypt - both Ptolemaic and the later Roman Provincial issues - underwent significant "manufacturing" processes. These skimmed-off the surface of the flan's faces removing any foreign matter picked up from the molds and setting-up a "fresh", non-hardened surface for striking. At the same time, although possibly with different machinery, any "flashing" around the edges where molds may not have met with 100% precision were also machined off. The processes by which this was done left the small "centration dimples" which you see in these pieces (here and at other Provincial mints.) There has been a large amount of speculation as to how this all was accomplished. The best theoretical reconstruction I have ever seen, plus an in-depth discussion can be seen on this website. [URL]http://www.classicalcoins.com/flans1.html[/URL] This all makes perfect mechanical sense, however (so far) no one has ever discovered a "mint of Pompeii". (This is a euphemism. Of course there was no mint in Pompeii or Herculaneum.) If there were a mint found somewhere which had been preserved whole with all its equipment, we might have artifact-based archeological evidence for the various operations. So we must rely upon theory and conjecture to reconstruct the procedures and machines in the absence of written records or preserved artifacts. The Romans were very good at dismantling their mints, evidently, since to the best of my knowledge, sites presumed to have been minting officinae are marked out by nothing more than the probable foundations of furnaces - everything else is long gone.[/QUOTE]
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