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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;Sallent, post: 2499356, member: 76194&quot;]By sheer coincidence, I received the thinnest Roman denarius and thinnest Islamic dirham I&#039;ve bought to date in the mail on the same day. It&#039;s been interesting comparing how my thinnest and lightest denarius stacks up to the thinnest and lightest Islamic coin.</p><p><br /></p><p>[ATTACH=full]530095[/ATTACH]</p><p><br /></p><p>I can&#039;t even begin to describe just how thin and lightweight my Julia Maesa denarius is compared to all my other denarii in the 3.0g+ range. Had I not acquired it from a reliable source, or known just how light Severan denarii can get, I would have thought it fake.&nbsp; But even more shocking is the thinnest of my Abbasid dirham. Holly cow, it almost feels razor thin. Just look at that.</p><p><br /></p><p>Of course, the Julia Maesa is 2.1g, and the Abbasid dirham is a mighty 2.6g in comparison, but when you stretch 2.6g to 24mm+, something has to give somewhere to make it that large with so little silver.</p><p><br /></p><p>[ATTACH=full]530096[/ATTACH]</p><p><br /></p><p>The Abbasid dirham makes my earlier Umayyad dirham look big and beefy in comparison. And that&#039;s no surprise considering the Umayyads held on to Spain and the Spanish silver mines after being overthrown by the Abbasids, which means the Abbasids had to fund their many universities, scholars, scientists, and armies without the vast silver reserves of Spain...so naturally the coinage had to get smaller and thinner.</p><p><br /></p><p>Look at the ghosting on the obverse!</p><p>[ATTACH=full]530100[/ATTACH]</p><p>See the three lines from the script on the other side?</p><p><br /></p><p>And look at the even more noticeable ghosting on the reverse:</p><p><br /></p><p>[ATTACH=full]530101[/ATTACH]</p><p><br /></p><p>It sort of reminds me of the ghosting from the crosses on medieval English pennies. In fact, I would say the thickness between this coin and an English penny is comparable.</p><p><br /></p><p>Meanwhile, the Julia Mesa definitely doesn&#039;t suffer that fate, despite being lighter, due to being much smaller and thicker.</p><p><br /></p><p>[ATTACH=full]530105[/ATTACH] [ATTACH=full]530103[/ATTACH][/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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