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Tetricus 1 official and barb coins

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Robert_Brenchley:
Most Tetricus barbs are really crude but some are anything but, and someone raised the question of how to tell them from official issues. Here's a nice official Tetricus; note the naturalistic nose, the hairstyle, the blurring of the inscription, the strike marks and the ragged flan. the last three all result from the same thing; striking cruddy metal. As it stretches it cracks, and the movement of the metal under the die produces the characteristic striations, and blurs the lettering. You need soft, malleable metal like fine silver or gold to get a really crisp image around the coin edge.

Robert_Brenchley:
This is another official coin, but in a different style; note the straight line from the forehead to the tip of the nose.

Robert_Brenchley:
This is a nice barb; it has some resemblance to the last coin (note the straight-line nose, which is a constant feature) but note also the different style eye, the hair, the blundered reverse inscription and the edge detail, which is as crisp as that at the centre. There are no flan cracks or strike marks on these, and I'm convinced they're good quality casts. They're still nice coins though, at least as far as I'm concerned.

Robert_Brenchley:
This is an interesting one; note the crisp edge detail, good centring and nice flan, quite unnatural for Tetricus! If it was a coin of an expensive emperor, I'd have assumed it was a modern fake, but who'd spend time faking this?

The interest lies in the strange-looking portrait, what there is of it; I've never seen a coin like it. After puzzling over it for a while, I've come to the conclusion that the maker didn't add enough metal to the mould, or maybe tipped it over, and the metal shrank away from the mould as it cooled.

Robert_Brenchley:
It would be interesting to see similar comparisons for other periods, but Tetricus is the only emperor I have enough barbs of to do it.

It was an interesting exercise because these are casts without any of the classic pitting; maybe they had better techniques in those days.

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