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Conclusions From the minting experiment, I found that my idea of efficiency as the amount of time it took to mint a certain number of coins was too simplistic. The hardness of the metal turned out to be a crucial factor in the minting process. Although cold-striking and hot-striking debased coins took roughly the same time, hot striking was much better in making higher quality coins. Because time alone would put the two methods for debased coins at the same level of efficiency, one must take into account how many acceptable coins were struck. Hot striking clearly was more efficient in these terms, creating 11 times more acceptable coins. Hot striking for both types of coins yielded better quality coins. Quality should be weighed with efficiency (in terms of time) to gain a better sense of which method the Romans used. The new measurement of efficiency, therefore, would take into account two ratios: one between the raw number of seconds it took to strike a coin, and one between the raw number of seconds to strike an acceptable coin. For silver coins, the Romans probably had the option of both hot striking and cold striking efficiently. Hot striking may be less efficient by 38% ([29s-18s]/29s) in terms of raw number of seconds it takes to strike one coin, but it is more efficient by 144% ([73s-178s]/73s) in terms of raw number of seconds it takes to strike one acceptable coin. I decided that both cold striking and hot striking were viable options, because I assumed that with bigger hands, bouncing would not be as much of a problem for cold striking pure silver coins. With bigger hands, the upper die could be much more stabilized, and more acceptable coins could be made. For example, if just three more acceptable silver coins were made through cold striking, the efficiency of cold striking in terms of acceptable coins would only be 18% less efficient. This shows that with a bigger hand, cold striking and hot striking pure silver coins becomes comparable in efficiency. Because my hand is undoubtedly much smaller than an ancient male Roman mint worker’s, I can assume that the ancient mint workers were more efficient at cold striking in comparison to the other methods than I was. For debased silver coins, I found that there was no comparability between the efficiencies of cold striking and hot striking. Hot striking was clearly better than cold striking. It was almost the exact same efficiency in terms of the raw time it took to make a coin. It was only .6 percent more efficient than cold striking. However, it was 1010% more efficient than cold striking in terms of the raw time it took to make an acceptable coin. Even if I assumed that with a bigger hand, a few more acceptable coins could be made, the efficiency of hot striking would still be much better than cold striking. Furthermore, because the cold debased coin blank has a higher hardness than the cold pure silver coin blank, one would have to be extremely strong and steady in order to keep the upper die from bouncing at all when cold striking debased coins. One last line of evidence points to the hot striking of debased coins. If the debased coins were hot struck, they would exhibit a silvery surface just like the ones recreated in the experiment. In reality, this is the case as seen in the silvery appearance of Elagabalus’ denarius (Figure 23). From this experiment, both cold striking and hot striking were found to be acceptable methods for making pure or nearly pure silver coinage. However, the hot striking method was necessary for making debased silver coinage. What this implies is that when the coins were nearly pure silver, mint organization could be flexible. With cold striking, the mint-workers could be kept apart from each other. Each could efficiently work independently (Zograph 1977: 48). In my experiment, I noted that it was quite difficult to do hot striking by myself because I had to keep putting implements down and pick them up again. Also, the danger of the hot coin blank was ever present. In ancient times, they would not have had a furnace that automatically kept temperatures at 600 degrees Celsius like I did. They would have had an open wood or charcoal-burning furnace. Thus, at least one other person was needed to stoke the fires in ancient times. Hot striking would have been extremely inefficient otherwise. According to Zograph, hot striking meant that the mint workers could work together. One had to stoke the fires of the open furnace, another held the upper die, another put the coin blank on the lower die, and yet another swung the hammer (Zograph 1977: 50). Thus, there was much more potential for communication and interaction with hot striking. Hot striking was more correlated to a factory-like setting than cold striking was. This could mean that the mint workers, who were all slaves, had a higher ability to organize and mobilize. This experiment might show the situations from which they were able to organize and mobilize in the massive mint workers’ revolt of 272 A.D. Nearly 7000 soldiers were killed suppressing the rebellion. Because the coins of 272 A.D. were heavily debased, one can assume that hot striking was employed and that this involved a factory-like, relatively large-scale operation. A mass of disgruntled mint workers interacting with one another in a Roman mint in a time of instability could be a recipe for disaster. Indeed, the mint workers somehow did organize and mobilize a large enough force to be a major challenge to the Roman army. Debased coinage requiring hot striking may be one of the factors in how they could have mobilized. Because of the limited scope of my experiment, I was only able to test two different types of coins: pure silver and 40% debased silver. It answered questions concerning which method was most efficient for each type. However, was efficiency important to the Roman mints, which were operated by slave labor? To find out, I could, by the means of micrographs and atomic absorption analysis, find the relationship between the percentage of silver in a denarius and the method of striking. By studying the internal structure of an ancient coin, one can find out whether it was hot or cold struck. Creating a graph that plots the relationship between silver content and method would be fruitful and further shed light on the world of the humble ancient Roman mint worker. I hope to pursue this question in the near future. |