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 had been no pandemic!).
Coin A yielded at least 70 dots on the obverse and 62 on the reverse; Coin B yielded 67 and 62, respectively. Examination of two other coins yielded less useful results but are still interesting (C: 57+, 87; D: 46+, 69). Counting Athena can be quite difficult because the plaits of her hair or part of her helmet crest are usually off of the coin, are not fully struck, or exhibit much die wear, hence the low obverse counts on Coins C and D; but the parts that can be examined produce very similar numbers to those areas on coins whose design and die-state are most conducive to this kind of exercise.
Where it is possible to count the dots, we can see some range in the number but this, I think, is mostly a function of the size of the drill bit. The owl’s body on D has only some 33 dots, but they appear to be a bit larger and are slightly more spaced out than on C, for instance, where they appear quite jumbled and are slightly smaller. Smaller drill size translates into more frequent use of the drill if the object is to create the same impression of texture in the owl’s plumage, for example. All in all, if we take these four coins as randomly representative of the coinage, then a die-cutter would probably need to use the drill over 60 times for each die (and, it seems, the obverse die would need just a few more dots than the reverse).
While we should be impressed by the sheer labor and skill required to manipulate the drill that frequently over the highly concave surfaces in the dies that the die-cutter was creating, there is another lesson that might also be drawn. Quality-control at every level, from the die-cutter himself to various overseers at the mint and, ultimately, the Athenian dêmos itself produced a high-functioning system that could produce enormous quantities of these coins at rapid pace and use dies that had to be hand-drilled and hand-cut to a remarkably uniform standard. We know nothing about this system except for the coins that it produced. How were the dies examined and by what specific criteria were they judged? How often were dies rejected? What was the exact model that the die-cutters used?
There are many more questions that should be asked of these coins, and perhaps if we look closely enough and with enough intelligence, they may surrender a few of their secrets. These coins are common and easy to overlook precisely because they played such a significant role in the events of their time and continued to play a role in commerce and daily life for generations thereafter. Old, worn, abused, corroded, seemingly uninteresting, common coins very much deserve a new eye, now and far into the future—after all, they were the stuff of commerce and war on a large scale. So, let us now take another look at whatever at first glance seems dull, worn, abused, or simply too common to waste time upon as exactly what we should be spending our time exploring.
