Missing the Mark

While this reverse is certainly beautiful, you cannot help but notice one thing straight away- it is only partially visible. Today machines produce coins, but in ancient times the minting was done by hand. The coin blank (a piece of metal) would be placed on a lower die (dies work like stamps, imprinting images on coins) and a worker would try to hold the upper die over the blank. Another worker would strike these- lower die, blank, and upper die- with a hammer, imprinting the intricate images onto the metal.

This sounds just as difficult as it was in reality. If any of these aspects was misaligned, the image on the coin would be off-center. The priority, however, lay in speed- while production rates varied, one man could mint as many as 100 coins in an hour. David Grenville John Sellwood, “Ancient Minting”, Brittanica, accessed 10 March 2022. It’s unsurprising that they hardly cared if a couple of them looked off, and if the poor quality undermined some of the moneyer’s bombastic claims about his great family, that’s just too bad.