Comments on: Historians and scientists collaborate to crack 2,500 year-old mystery

By: Vaughan Pratt

Vaughan Pratt — Sun, 20 Sep 2015 19:54:19 +0000

I think you’ll find that the reverse is cruder than the obverse and is therefore not true incuse but rather a technique used in the process of stamping the coin whereby the more raised parts of the obverse, which may be as high as the thickness of the blank itself, are pressed into an incuse die, actually bending the blank in the process. The finer features such as the text, the daimon, etc. do not entail wholesale bending but rather the surface of the blank simply flows into the die under the pressure of the stamping. With neutron scattering it should be possible to tell which parts of the blank were bent and which parts merely flowed under pressure. (At Lysaght Bros. wire factory’s lab in Sydney in the 1960s we did this sort of metallurgical analysis with much more primitive tools, necessarily more destructively.)

By: Martine Balit

Martine Balit — Fri, 24 Apr 2015 00:07:29 +0000

Hi William,

The inscription is the name of the town. It means “of the people of Caulonia”

Kind regards

Martine

By: Robert Morrison

Robert Morrison — Thu, 23 Apr 2015 06:10:30 +0000

Interesting article. The age of the coin and the inscription seem to suggest that the coin is Greek origin/ made by Greek settlers living in the area.

By: William Markham

William Markham — Sat, 28 Mar 2015 11:41:52 +0000

The inscription on the coin looks like archaic Greek where the words run from right to left, as in archaic Etruscan language. It would be interesting to know what the inscription means.