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Message:: [QUOTE="Valentinian, post: 2851531, member: 44316"]The "die box" theory of minting has the obverse die firmly mounted in an anvil and the reverse dies hand held (with tongs). When the mint workers take a break (say, at the end of the day) they put the reverse dies back in the "die box," but the obverse die remains in its anvil. When the workers come back, they select a reverse die to use with their anvil. It is known that reverse dies, which take the blow of the hammer, tend to break more rapidly than obverse dies. (For large late Republican issues Crawford used the ratio of 10 reverses for 9 obverses, and in medieval England official records show mints were supplied with two reverse dies for each obverse die. Other ratios vary, but yield more reverses than obverses.)   If the mint is small, as most Greek mints were, there might be only one die of each type used at a time. Then reverse dies were often used to exhaustion (breakage) before they had a chance to be used with more than two obverse dies (when the obverse die breaks, as it eventually will, the reverse die in use at the time can be used with a second obverse die but will rarely outlast that one too.) The "die box theory" can explain why several reverse dies (or types) can be used with one obverse. This idea fits mints so large that the production rate would warrant having several dies on hand, rather than having dies engraved on demand.[/QUOTE]