ancients, medievals: questions about dies + production

XpipedreamR

I bought a solidus of Byzantine Emperor Focas today. Kind of an impulse buy to add to my growing impulse collection of medieval and ancient coins


Being much more of a moderns guy, I'm having trouble relating to what the method of die production, etc. would be. I assume that dies must have been engraved by hand, individually? Or not? Was more than one set of dies used to strike a given issue? Would sets of dies, assuming they were all hand-made, be dramatically different? Do people collect these by die "variety?" How many coins do you think could be produced from one set of these dies? How many of a given issue were minted? I know this would probably be quite variable, but are we talking thousands? Millions? Hundreds?


I know these questions are very general, and I'm asking about an enormous range of coins, well over a thousand years' worth, but since I really don't know anything I would love ANY information on this stuff. Also, any informational websites, etc. would be great to hear about. Does anyone here collect these kinds of coins? Where to start??? ARRRRRRGH



Thank you!!!

XpipedreamR

What do you store these things(gold) in? Are soft PVC flips OK? These are all so foreign, I feel like I'm trying to collect coins from Mars. No wonder "Byzantine" came to mean "complex."

GDJMSP

The period you're asking about is a bit too early for me, I could offer help for minting methods back to the 12th century but that's about it. But even 600 yrs later than the period you are asking about - yes, all of the dies were made 1 at a time and by hand. They did use punches for individual letters and simple designs such as a circle or slash ( straight line ) to help save time and make the process as efficient as possible. And the mint masters were quite careful about keeping an eye on dies and replacing them when necessary. Their regulations even required that as many as a dozen pairs of dies for each denomination were kept on hand as replacements as needed. And since the metal in the dies was somewhat soft by today's standards - they used a lot of dies. Die sinkers kept busy full time at the mints - even when bullion was not plentiful.

As for quantities, it depended greatly on the denomination being struck. Large denomination coins in silver or gold were often struck in smaller numbers except perhaps those used as trade coins. Even then the numbers were often in the hundreds of thousands. But small denomination coins such as those used in everyday commerce often had mintages into the millions. Especially if the issuing authority had large population centers.

BigAlan

How many coins do you think could be produced from one set of these dies?

Depending on the metal, about 10,000 for copper.

Sapyx

Ancient coin dies were entirely hand-carved; punches only came into use in the middle ages, when speed of manufacture was more important than quality. Thus each die was a unique work of art.

The designs tend not to vary too much from die to die, as the die-cutters would rely on slavishly copying the design from the previous dies. In the early Byzantine period, the language on the coins was still Latin. This despite the fact that by this stage the Empire's Latin-speaking regions had mostly fallen to the barbarians and most of the remaining population were Greek-speakers. This is reflected in the fact that spelling errors on these coins are fairly common; not even the die-cutters could speak the language they were writing in. Rather, they were relying on whoever made the die they were copying from getting it right.

As individual dies wore out, they'd be replaced. Numismatic research of a particular coin type often focusses on the "die chain", as first one die, then the other, is changed. As far as most collectors are concerned, unless it's a major change (eg a spelling error), die varieties aren't highly sought after.

As to mintages, for the most part, we really don't know. Normally all we can do is speculate, based on the actual numbers known to have survived. Records would have been kept for total mintages for the year, of course, but whether they survived the centuries is another matter. Generally, speaking, Byzantine mintages seem to be lower that their Roman equivalents - as the empire shrunk, the size of the economy shrunk accordingly.

Storing ancient gold coins? Not much can harm them - not even PVC does much damage.

BigAlan

If you are interested in that sort ofthing two books of interest

Jones A Dictionary of Ancient Roman Coins

Howgego Ancient History From Coins