Question about ancient Roman coins

Hi everybody,

I am not a collector but it has always puzzled me why ancient Roman
coins that I have seen in photos (and indeed, coins from throughout the
ancient world) are always oddly shaped and never perfectly round or
symmetrical. Though I imagine they must exist, I have never personally
seen one that is perfectly round and with the stamp perfectly centered.
It seems that given the technology of the time, reasonably well-shaped
coins should have been doable with maybe the occasional off stamp on a
coin here or there. Is this due to corrosion, wear and tear or simply
indifference on the part of the coin makers?

Thanks,

--Sean C

Sean C wrote:
Hi everybody,

I am not a collector but it has always puzzled me why ancient Roman
coins that I have seen in photos (and indeed, coins from throughout the
ancient world) are always oddly shaped and never perfectly round or
symmetrical. Though I imagine they must exist, I have never personally
seen one that is perfectly round and with the stamp perfectly centered.
It seems that given the technology of the time, reasonably well-shaped
coins should have been doable with maybe the occasional off stamp on a
coin here or there. Is this due to corrosion, wear and tear or simply
indifference on the part of the coin makers?

Thanks,

--Sean C

The Production of Ancient Coins
http://oldmoney.vassar.edu/papers/production.html

How Roman Coins Were Made
http://detecting-finds.50megs.com/roman.html

On Oct 8, 4:42 pm, Sean C wrote:
... why ancient Roman ... are always oddly shaped ...
It seems that given the technology of the time, ...

Perfectly round, modern-looking coins only go back to about 1700.
Though earlier examples are known, for instance from Spain and from
France in the late 1500s to mid-1600s, the process only was
standardized about the time that Sir Isaac Newton was master and
warden of the British Royal Mint, at the very end of the 1600s, the
"Great Recoinage" of 1696.

A number of factors are at work.

1. In ancient times, there was simply no demand that coins be "better
looking" than they were.
2. The amount of labor (time, machinery; invention) put into a coin
must be paid for somehow. Coins would have become smaller or less
pure.... or the government (or minter: in the middle ages it was often
bishops) would have to absorb the loss. The US Mint did that for many
years, probably the better part of its first 100 (maybe 150!) years,
running at a deadweight loss made up for by taxes.
3. Coining tends to be very conservative.
3.a. The kind of device that puts the reeded edge on a coin -- the
Castaing Device -- kept its basic functionality for about 100 years,
and its basic modality for another 50 or so after that.
3.b. The greatest innovations in coining came first from the private
sector. James Watt (inventor of the steam engine) and Matthew Boulton
established the Birmingham Mint about 1780 and their engines and
machineries were a quantum leap in production skills. Governments
followed, buying new machineries when they had been proofed out. In
fact, the first steam press was not installed at the Philadelphia Mint
until _1836_!
3.c. Changing the method of production would change the appearance.
That might make a coin less acceptable. In fact, those first very
modern coins of the Birmingham Mint were not government coins at all,
but private merchant tokens for taverns, etc. So, there was a new
demand from a new market met by new kinds of coins.

4. Modern coins get their sharp images from the tremendous machine
pressures that actually make metal flow, turn it liquid. In ancient
times, coin planchets were heated red and then struck with a
sledgehammer striking a die. The earliest coins with two images
(about 550 BC or so -- some argument there) had one side carved into
an anvil. So, the hot metal flowed beyond the edges of the engraved
dies.

4.a. The die collar was invented only about 1600 (again, some early
examples), used in larger Mints (Spain, France, Britain) and not put
into full practice until the 1830s in the USA and then not
consistently for a couple more years. Look at US colonial and early
Republic coins and you will an incomplete procedure in which some
coins are collared, but not all. Edge-lettering and other edging was
applied via different machineries until the production was finally
standardized as you and I might understand it only after the American
Civl War.

4. You are used to counting coins to know their total value. In most
times and places, coins were weighed. It did not matter what size or
shape they were. (Some discussion here. Clearly, in a town, the
town's own coins were better known and more likley to just be
counted. Even when silver coins of Britain were legally counted for
taxes, gold coins were still legally weighed for taxes.) That goes
back to 1. Why bother to put a nice edge on coins, if no one cared?

Here are a couple of online articles from COIN WORLD about "the third
side of the coin."
http://www.coinworld.com/news/050707/bw_0507.asp
http://www.coinworld.com/news/062104/BW_0621.asp

Mike M.
Michael E. Marotta

On Oct 8, 5:42 pm, Jim Higgins wrote:
The Production of Ancient Coinshttp://oldmoney.vassar.edu/papers/production.html


Speaking of Old Money at the Vassar Museum...

December 5, 2005
James Mundy
The Anne Hendricks Bass Director
The Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center
124 Raymond Avenue Box 703
Poughkeepsie, New York 12604-0703

Dear Mr. Mundy,

You received an email from me today about a problem with plagiarism on
your museum’s website, http://oldmoney.vassar.edu/.
[... etc...]

.... lifts entire paragraphs of my work, verbatim and without
citation. You certainly must agree that this is a problem.

[... etc. ...]

You will find printouts accompanying this letter to substantiate my
claims. My email to you gave URLs and other pointers to these works.

Sincerely Yours,
Michael E. Marotta
---------------------------------

(The entire site was taken down briefly and the offending work was
removed within minutes. MEM)

Mike Marotta wrote:

4. Modern coins get their sharp images from the tremendous machine
pressures that actually make metal flow, turn it liquid.

Please Michael.
Plastic flow *ain't* liquid.
You know that.

Great email, otherwise. Thanks for that.
Restores one's faith in NGs.

--
Jeff R.

On Oct 8, 4:42*pm, Sean C wrote:

I am not a collector but it has always puzzled me why ancient Roman
coins that I have seen in photos (and indeed, coins from throughout the
ancient world) are always oddly shaped and never perfectly round or
symmetrical. Though I imagine they must exist, I have never personally
seen one that is perfectly round and with the stamp perfectly centered...

There are perfectly round and centered, or nearly perfectly round and
centered, ancient Roman and Greek coins. You're right that they're the
exception. The reason is that for the most part the ancients struck
coins by hand using a heavy hammer, leading to designs being more or
less off-centered, and they didn't use a collar, so planchets expanded
under the hammer's blow unequally in different directions.

--

Consumer: http://rg.ancients.info/guide
Connoisseur: http://rg.ancients.info/glom
Counterfeit: http://rg.ancients.info/bogos

On Oct 8, 5:43*pm, Mike Marotta wrote:
[snip]
Excellent response, Mike, as usual. But I do have one tiny nit-pick:

Perfectly round, modern-looking coins only go back to about 1700.

True if you're talking about struck coinage, but Chinese cast cash
were being made, perfectly round, over two thousand years ago. Of
course, it's a lot easier to make perfectly round cast coins- use a
geometer's compass or equivalent to make the mold for the seed coin,
then all molds made from the seed coin will also yield perfectly round
coins. But would the great masterpieces of Western classical coinage-
Syracusan dekadrachms, to cite one example- have been any more
beautiful if the Greeks had been able to strike them on perfectly
round planchets?

-Robert A. DeRose, Jr.