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Author Topic: Is this a Fouree?  (Read 643 times)

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jslade

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Is this a Fouree?
« on: June 30, 2022, 09:42:00 am »
Hello,

I recently picked up a denarius of Diadumenian at auction. I received it yesterday and began to have some concerns. First off, it was very light in hand. Light to the point it felt "wrong". The listing specified that the weight and diameter were 2.53g and 20mm respectively so maybe that should have been cause for concern but its kind of hard for me to mentally translate those number into an in-hand feel.

I then took a closer look at the coin under magnification and the encrustations near the rim at 6:00 on the obverse looked a bit odd to me. At this point I decided to dab a small quantity of lemon juice on the encrustation using a fine point Q-tip to see what was revealed. What I saw was spots of reddish brown metal surrounded by silver. I'm almost positive that this is copper.

The first image I've attached shows a cropped version of the picture provided by the auction house. The bottom two images were taken by me after I had exposed the underlying copper.

So is this indeed a fouree or could something else explain what I'm seeing?

Thanks,

JSlade

Offline PeterD

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Re: Is this a Fouree?
« Reply #1 on: June 30, 2022, 11:40:23 am »
The weight is low but not impossible for an official coin.

The brown patch looks more like impurities in the silver or some transfer of copper from a close-by copper coin when buried underground. On fourees, the copper core usually corrodes, pushing through the silver plate, leaving a black patch with perhaps some de-laminated silver.

At any rate, you should show all of both sides of the coin, since it might be possible to determine if the dies that struck the coin were unofficial.
Peter, London

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jslade

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Re: Is this a Fouree?
« Reply #2 on: June 30, 2022, 05:56:51 pm »
Here are some additional pictures to help in the determination. I tried to include an edge-on closeup of the coin around the 6:00 edge but it didn't turn out very well.

Thanks,

JSlade

jslade

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Re: Is this a Fouree?
« Reply #3 on: July 01, 2022, 08:32:17 am »
I brought the coin into work and took a look at it under the microscope. Under magnification it became clear that the areas I was concerned with were just incrustations on the surface of the coin and not copper being exposed beneath the silver. Thanks for the input PeterD.

 

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