new addition an Owl of the Athenians

Andres

busy with buying paper currency lately, stumbled into this tetradrachma silver coin,
bought it because of the great eye appeal imho. (sellers picture)
its on his way from Germany,

SaorAlba

Very nice

Andres

Its an contemporary chiselmark or testcut , very common on these coins, this one doesnt bother me too much,
many are cut on the face of Pallas or on the owl's body / head , sometimes multiple times.
there were loads of fakes around at the time these were in circulation,
they were made of copper with a thin silver layer , called fourrees.

Here's a coin with plenty of testcuts, seller still wants $1500 for it:

JCMhouston

Nice Andres.

worldcoinguy

Very nice piece.

asheland

Cool piece!

STLNATS

Of course, everyone would prefer an undamaged coin and such cuts are considered damage. But these coins shouldn't be immediately rejected since coins with these test cuts are actually historically important.



Athens' long running feud with Sparta broke out into open hostilities with the start of the Peloponnesian War in 431. Athens did not fare well and ended up losing by the end of the century. Toward the end of the war Athens had exhausted her resources, including silver, and issued the silver plated coins as a last gasp, emergency measure. The Athenian tet had long been an important trade coin and the test cuts would seem to be evidence that the debasement was quickly and fairly easily detected. The market's confidence in Athenian silver was badly shaken and the cuts provided reassurance that the coin being offered was of good silver.



BTW, altho not a strong area of interest, I have one of these with a deep test cut across the forehead (the thickest part of the coin) and a punch mark on the reverse. High grade with all of the details there, it was cheap and was a natural "why not" buy. Always smile when I see it.



As a side bar, the war weary times produced the comic playwright Aristophanes whose plays included the strongly antiwar play Lysistrata which was "rediscovered" during the late Vietnam era by a lot of college students (including me). There's also one or two references to coins in his plays including a reference that jurors received very small coins (3 obols a day as I recall) which they kept in their cheek for safety.



What fun!