As you may have noticed from some of my other pages, one of the things that I enjoy about collecting ancients is finding coins that, for whatever reason, have unusual features or small differences in their manufacture.

I found this particular coin in March of 2004 while looking through the trays of one of the dealers at the Northwest Coin Show in Brooklyn Center, Minnesota. I almost passed this one by, but when I looked closely at the reverse, I knew that I had found a coin that just had to come home with me : )

This coin falls far short of being a beauty, and it may be lacking in the "Wow" factor, but it is the flaws in the coin that make it personally interesting to myself.

Because of the way in which they were created....ie: cut and struck by hand by hurried/harried mint workers....ancient coins frequently contain errors that would seldom make it into circulation from modern mints. Perhaps the Roman mints had much smaller budgets for their Quality Control departments ;-)

In any case, from the general wear of the coin, you can see that this one spent some time in circulation, but what caught my eye was the reverse. Look at the lower right quadrent of the coin, and you will see a horizontal line going across the field, from the edge of Annona's skirt, right to the edge of the design.

This line is caused by a broken die.

By looking at the legend on the left side of the coin, and comparing it to the legend on the right side of the reverse, you can see that the right side has much better definition than the left, possibly caused by the mint worker holding the top die at an angle during striking. It may be that this uneven pressure caused the fracture in the die over the course of many strikes.

Another interesting feature of this coin is the lettering of the reverse legend. If you look at the next picture, you will see trench-like excavations around the "O" and the "S". I received several opinions from members of the Moneta discussion list as to possible causes: 1) Modern (19th century) tooling done to bring out the detail of the legend; 2)The use of a punch by the mint workers to create the legend; 3) Unknown cause....just a part of the minting process.

Curtis Clay from HJB Coin was kind enough to send his thoughts on the coin:

Ancient mints don't seem to have minded such die breaks, as a general rule. As long as the die still worked, a small extra line in the rev. field didn't matter much. I suspect it was actual breakage of the die, rather than quality control, that generally caused the withdrawal of such dies from use! However, it is unusual to find such a large break on a Roman sestertius. The depressions around the letters of the rev. legend on your coin are not signs of die wear as you thought, nor 19th-cent. tooling as suggested by another list member, but results of the engraving process whose cause is still mysterious to me, that are found on quite a few Roman coins.

On the next picture, notice how the dotted border is gradually worn further down as it gets closer to the die break, but after the break, it is suddenly raised again. The letters "O" and "S", and the first "I" in "COS IIII" are also quite worn, but the last two "II" are nicely raised above the surface of the coin. Look at how the die break runs right into the third "I". The break runs right down the middle of the "I", but if you look closely, the superior part of the "I" is worn almost down to the surface of the coin, but the inferior part is raised again!

This lower area seems to have created a "protected area" that kept the last two II from wearing as quickly as the rest of the coin while it was circulating in the Roman world.

With the mint at Rome turning out the huge number of coins needed to keep the Roman economy afloat, it is very likely that the mint workers would have struck any number of coins with this set of dies before the break was discovered, and there may be other examples of this coin gracing other collections. I would be very interested in hearing from anyone else that has a similar coin. If you happen to have an example, or know of a picture of one, please e-mail me at: CelatorsArt