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New NumisWiki Article: Roman Coins - How Many Were Made?

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Danny S. Jones:
I have read estimates between tens of millions to 1.5 trillion total coins minted during the Roman period.

I found an interesting article that addresses the fact that numerical estimations of Roman coin production is extremely unreliable.

Calculating Ancient Coin Production: Facts and Fantasies
T. V. BUTTREY
The Numismatic Chronicle (1966-)
Vol. 153 (1993), pp. 335-351 (17 pages)
Published by: Royal Numismatic Society

Link below:
https://www.jstor.org/stable/42667930

Virgil H:
That is a very interesting article and certainly demonstrates the limits of scholarship and dangers of making conclusions on such flimsy evidence. This is a fascinating topic and I am no expert in this area. However, the questions that arise for me I am not sure may be measured. Yet.

150 a day seems very low. 30,000 per die seems high. But what do I know? The real questions relate to how mints operated. Were these traditional jobs where people worked every day all day? If so, one would think the system would have some efficiencies that would allow for many coins per day. 150 is nothing, really, even with a manual system. 150 an hour maybe is more realistic. But that depends on how many workers are involved and the fact that multiple workers would mean multiple dies being used at one time.

How did the mints operate? Did they produce flans for a while and then do the striking or were all the various steps done by different people in an assembly line or even different places, as in flan production? Again, how many striking teams were working at once? Were die engravers working all the time or only when new dies were needed? So many questions.

Did the mints operate year round or only at specified times when coins were needed?

Was this a part-time job? Full-time? What even was a full time job back then? Did people work more or less than now? I have an impression that people perhaps were not as obsessed with work back then as we are today. Maybe slaves were worked more, but who knows? Today, being a workaholic is a virtue in America (not so much in other countries). Was it this way in antiquity? Somehow, I doubt it. Capitalism wasn't yet known.

Virgil

SC:
You raise some interesting questions.

Too often people focus only on the technical questions - which are important - like how many dies were used for an issue and how any coins were struck per die.  But there is not enough focus on those operational questions you raise. 

People have studied how mints would have operated.  I note in my book that Estiot and Zanchi's study of the operation of the Trier mint 292/293 AD resulted in the following conclusions - two officinae working, a total of at least 11 teams of strikers (so an officinae was not one single anvil), each striking team comprising 6 to 8 employees so 66-88 employees active in these striking teams (plus mint employees working in the mint but not directly in striking teams).  Each team producing 6,000 coins per workday so 66,000 coins per workday from the 11 striking teams.  (Sylvaine Estiot and Pierre Zanchi, De Lyon a Treves: L'ouverture de l'atelier de Treves a l'epoque tetrarchique et ses premieres emissions, in Revue Numismatique 171, 2014.  And that is only one of several mints active in 292/293.

But one thing we don't know is how many workdays there were.  I don't just mean how many work days in a year versus holidays, but 'was the mint meant to operate on a full time basis or not".  As you noted, was it a full time job trying to operate all the time, or did it operate on a project basis - "we have an order for coins, let's operate at our 66,000/day capacity until we finish the job and then wait for the next job".  Hard to be sure though we have no real indications of other professions for mint staff and there are things written that suggest it was a full time job - for example the law that makes mint staff "ignoble" - that is of commoner class - or the description of Aurelian's struggle with the rebellion of the "monetari" of the mint of Rome in 271.

SC

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