These are the first known coins from ancient Tiffily, a small now-submerged ancient island nation somewhere off the
west coast of
Anatolia. The exact location is being withheld to prevent opportunists from disturbing the historic site. Dive teams are methodically excavating the city. In addition to coins and the usual remains of ancient civilizations,
engraved tablets have also been found and archaeologists are currently working on transcriptions. Apparently, these tablets record the
history of Tiffily, including myths and religious beliefs.
To date, several coins have been found at the underwater dig site. All have the same iconography: a winged iguana which the researchers have dubbed "Iguanasus". Hopefully, translation of the texts will reveal more details about this mysterious creature and Tiphonian culture.
TIFFILY, Tiphoniac. 5th century BCE
AR18, 7.4 gm, and AR 17, 7.4 gm
Obv: Forepart of winged iguana left
Rev: Monogram within dotted square,
incuseRef:
SNG Tiffily 1 and 2, respectively
This, and one other of similar size and weight, are puzzling. Metallurgic analysis shows them to be 99.9% silver yet they are somewhat porous. Perhaps the copper leached out over the centuries. These three coins are thought to be older than the rest. However, the dies are quite similar. Current thinking is that coins 1-3 were cast rather than struck.TIFFILY, Tiphoniac. 5th century BCE
AR 16, 6.0 gm
Obv: Forepart of winged iguana left
Rev: Monogram within dotted square,
incuseRef:
SNG Tiffily 4
This coin is missing from the research lab and it is feared that an unscrupulous member of the archaeology team has sold it on the black market.[img width=850 height=459https://www.forumancientcoins.com/numiswiki/images/sng-tiffily-5.jpg[/img]http://
TIFFILY, Tiphoniac. 5th century BCE
AR 16, 7.5 gm
Obv: Forepart of winged iguana left
Rev: Monogram within dotted square,
incuseRef:
SNG Tiffily 5
Most of the coins, including this one, are of terrible workmanship. One would think that these mint workers had no idea what they were doing. Clearly there was no quality control.TIFFILY, Tiphoniac. 5th century BCE
AR
tetradrachm (
Rhodian standard), 15 gm
Obv: Forepart of winged iguana left
Rev: Monogram within dotted square,
incuseRef:
SNG Tiffily 10
This coin is also missing and feared sold.Metallurgic analysis reveals that all Tiphonian coins found so far are an
alloy of 90% silver and 10% copper, except for
SNG Tiffily 1-3, which are 99.9% silver.
The dies for these Iguanasi were recovered. Oddly, they show very little sign of age and they look rather like the cut-off heads of hex bolts. Ancient Aliens?
I was impatient to try this and large hex bolts were the only readily available "die" material I could think of. It was not a
good choice.
The first two coins were pressed in
fine silver clay "flans" and then sintered. The next one was struck on a
flan of
fine silver melted into a rough
flan and slightly hammered. The first of the struck coins is lost in the bushes in the US Virgin Islands because the strike was a glancing blow (I swung the slegehammer like the girl that I am) and it squirted out some distance away and I couldn't find it. Several more went flying down the street. After a trying a few more with various degrees of failure, I recruited some guy who was walking down the street.
His strikes were harder and more accurate but I wanted self-sufficiency so I devised this Hammer of Hephaestus (better watch your fingers and your
head!!
)
This trip hammer didn't
work as well as I'd hoped because it was not anchored to the ground and the striking platform was similarly unstable. Flans were a'flyin'
.
Most were made from common circulated non-key/non-error melt value classic US coins which were first melted on a charcoal block to "erase" the
undertype.
At first I tried heating the flans to red-hot immediately prior to striking but it was very difficult to move the
flan to the striking set-up before they grew too cold and it turned out that striking a too-hot
flan created terrible cracks and bad surfaces. Cold but annealed flans would probably
work well but I think stability of the anvil/striking platform and sufficient strike force (and accuracy!) are key. One of these days I'm going to try again with dies carved either from dies carved into sufficiently large chunks of bronze or steel rods, or lost wax
cast dies (hand carved wax), or CAD-designed dies 3D printed to wax and then
cast. And a
stable striking platform!!
All such fun things have ground to a halt since the hurricanes though and now I'm just trying to repair and recover. The Sledge-O-Matic was a hurricane victim and the original dies are horribly rusted now.