A recent examination of a large number of these coins through photographs allowed me to see them in a new light. Even though the familiar elements such as the three leaves upon Athena’s helmet or the shape of her earring seem unchanging, I began to see slight, sometimes telling, differences from one coin to another even there once I adjusted my eyes to start looking at the coins as individual objects and not as identical products of something like an ancient factory. My purpose, I should note, was not to carry out any research per se—there was nothing that I was looking for explicitly—but rather to make good on a promise (made to myself) to look anew at coins that I was accustomed to look past—it was merely a conscientious exercise in trying to be a good numismatist. What I found in the sea of almost monotonous sameness made up by great quantities of Athenian tetradrakhmai, however, rewarded my effort in surprising ways.
One element which caught my attention was that the die-cutters used several different drills, or sizes of drill bits, with which to render everything from the owl’s plumage to the Athena’s necklace. Athena’s necklace, for instance, is almost always rendered with three large dots, while what seem to be rivets on her helmet are rendered in a smaller size, and so on. But how many dots are there, or, how many times did a die-cutter use the drill to cut any sized dot into the reverse or obverse die?
Starting with high quality good photographs, chosen at random, of four well-struck, centered, well-preserved specimens that were struck using different dies early in the life of those dies but otherwise simply typical of the coinage as a whole, I enlarged the photographs and printed them out, which enabled me then to count the dots created by those drills. The shadows created by the sculptural relief of these coins is hard to work around, and perhaps it would have been more productive to work with the Wulfing coins in the vault (if only there was no pandemic!).
(For visual reference, here is the link to a tetradrakhma in the Wulfing Collection [WC 231], which I did not include in this quick study because the Athena's crest if entirely off the flan and the dots on the owl's wings are perhaps a bit too worn to count, though I was able to count 72 dots on this reverse!: https://johnmaxwulfing.wustl.edu/wc-231).
