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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;DonnaML, post: 4579634, member: 110350&quot;][USER=97383]@Al Kowsky[/USER], I assumed that my coin had been cleaned or dipped in some sort of commercial cleaner, in order to make it look the way it does.&nbsp; Since I doubt it looked that way when it came out of the ground! Your example of the Mexican coin (I have one somewhere that was issued for the 1968 Olympics!) certainly proves that it&#039;s possible for a billon coin with 25% silver or less to look like a silver coin when it&#039;s issued without applying any kind of silver wash or plating.&nbsp; However, we&#039;ve all seen lots of later Roman billon coins with equally low percentages of silver content, and no silver wash -- whether because it was completely worn off or was never applied in the first place -- that wouldn&#039;t look like silver coins even if you dipped them 1000 times.&nbsp; Why are these Antioch tetradrachms different? What&#039;s the point of no return in terms of reducing silver fineness, beyond which one has to apply a silver wash to make the coin look like silver?&nbsp; Did the Romans have the technology to make a billon coin with as little as 10% silver (like the modern Mexican coin) look like a silver coin without applying anything?</p><p><br /></p><p>Separately, I don&#039;t blame the seller for representing my coin as &quot;AR&quot; to me, because it was part of a lot of similar Antioch billon tetradrachms -- all Gordian III or later, and all looking like silver coins -- that he had purchased earlier this year at a CNG auction, in which the entire lot was described as &quot;AR.&quot;&nbsp; Should CNG have identified my coin (and the others in the lot) as AR, even though my coin (like the others) is not only identified as &quot;Debased silver&quot; in RPC Online, but was identified as &quot;billon&quot; as long ago as 1899, when BMC 20 Syria was published?&nbsp; (I don&#039;t have access to Prieur, so I can&#039;t say how the metal of these coins is identified there.)[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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