Aged Roman Coins - Looking Back In History

By Carl Keller

The majority of novice coin collectors discover it hard to understand or interpret the words/letters on aged Roman coins. This happens for the reason that the carved engraver used for creating these coins used complex ellipsis for accommodating long legendary depictions onto the flans. Fascinatingly, the use of abbreviations led them to put in an astonishing amount of info in an unbelievably limited place.

A lot of people believe that coins had to play a central function in distributing news or facts to a large population suffering the curse of illiteracy. The civilians of Rome along with those in neighboring provinces maybe didn't know how to read. Though, they could send messages from one location to the other with coins - thus they were as good as any written words.

By encrypting visual courier messages on coins, the then Roman rulers used to express semi-concealed ideas to ordinary civilians. These messages sometimes intended to inform people or get them obedient to imperial authority.

For decades, roman society relied on barter structure that involved the trade of merchandise. Such a structure worked pretty well in fairly simple society trade primarily within local levels.

Villages at that period were relatively small and involved massive scale of trading from side to side among themselves. Nevertheless, when the society grew larger and more multifaceted, and since trading over bigger areas became common, the Roman Empire came to realize the need of reliable system to make easy trading and extra financial interaction.

The making of these coins

These coins were made of special metal plates on which coins were imprinted. Sometimes these metals were rolled into sheets. And there were times as these metals were embossed on circular blanks.

Several coins were prepared by pouring into coin molds. The dies that were used for producing these coins were probably produced by engraving certain type of makeshift image on iron. - 29957

About the Author:

Sign Up for our Free Newsletter

Enter email address here