Posted 08/29/2022 6:36 pm
Quote:
when these coins were first minted.. is this how shiny they would have originally looked?
when these coins were first minted.. is this how shiny they would have originally looked?
They would have looked pretty much the same as modern coins look when they're freshly minted - bright, shiny, and with "lustre". A cleaned coin - no matter the source or purpose for the cleaning - rarely restores that lustre, because lustre is created by tiny microscopic lines in the surface of the metal, which the cleaning destroys.
Quote:
...has there been any of these found in such mint condition that they are still shiny?
...has there been any of these found in such mint condition that they are still shiny?
Not for bronze coins like this one, no. Don't forget, there's no such thing as a coin that's been sitting around in a coin collection ever since Roman times; not even the Vatican coin collection is that old. Every single ancient coin surviving today survived because someone either lost it, or deliberately buried it. And nothing invented by man is 100% airtight or watertight, so whatever container a coin might have been buried in, after 2000 years, air and water will have leaked in. The laws of chemistry and physics simply will not allow bronze, brass and copper coins to survive getting buried for 2000 years, without turning into something that looks like a little green rock (or a little orange rock, if it was buried in the desert). Any "lustrous uncirculated ancient bronze coin" you might see is either fake, or very expertly cleaned.
Silver coins, while they won't actively corrode like copper-based coins, will nevertheless lose their "shine". Most will tarnish; some will develop "horn silver", which is a form of corrosion.
Gold coins? Absolutely, they can be found still as lustrous and shiny as the day they were minted. Pure gold doesn't corrode in any naturally occurring environment; this "noble" nature is of course one of the things that humans find attractive about gold. The slightly diluted gold often used for coinage will discolour slightly after centuries in the ground, but should still retain its lustre.
If the dinosaurs had made gold coins, they'd still be just as lustrous today too. Assuming we were capable of extracting them intact out of solid rock.
Don't say "infinitely" when you mean "very"; otherwise, you'll have no word left when you want to talk about something really infinite. - C. S. Lewis
