I found this roman denarius of Sabina denarius with a PVDICITIA reverse yesterday . Its had hard life but great bit of history. My question is how come this coin has bits missing would it of been debased. Thank you.
In a fire, maybe? Don't know. Fascinating find, though. Any day you find Roman silver has be a good day!
Yikes. The deep gouges on the obverse portrait, make me wonder, if the obverse portrait has been very heavily and crudely tooled. It looks like, someone tried to carve a line, between the hair and the face. Also, on the obverse, the field in front of the face, seems to have been gouged out, perhaps in order to carve the outline of the face. However, I'm not an expert, in detecting tooled coins. The reverse seems to have a lot of cleaning scratches, and it may also be tooled. Regarding the chunk of coin that is missing. Perhaps, as the coin lay in the ground for centuries, the base metal impurities in the coin, chemically reacted with the soil and disappeared, causing the coin to become brittle. Or, maybe the flan had a flaw, which caused the flan to break.