Turkish Kurush From 1774

I've been away for a week and missed this thread. Sorry about that.

Yober: as far as I can tell, swamperbob is correct: it looks exactly like the coin pictured in Krause as KM# 396. I'm pretty sure it isn't a trial strike, or pattern, or anything rare or unusual, except it does seem to be in better condition than the one illustrated in Krause.

Secondly, please stop cleaning it. It's fine the way it is. It was even finer the way it was. This coin is made of billon, a very low-grade silver that corrodes and tarnishes easily. It's not supposed to look nice and shiny. If it actually were a rare and valuable type, your treatment of it could have wiped out thousands of dollars worth of value. Fortunately, it's not a rare type, but that's no reason to degrade it any further.

Yober I see what you mean by variations in the die used to make your coin. But the variations you list are all the type that I would EXPECT to find on hand made dies of this time period. Each die should be different. Every die used to make Piastres was different. They were hand engraved and they never get the details exactly the same.

To say that your particular die is RARE would require a published analysis in a numismatic journal or technical book that would PROVE it is indeed special.

The numbers of coins that a die can produce will vary over a very wide range, based on the type of die and how the coins are struck. Luck is also involved. Modern dies used in the US mint have broken on the FIRST strike and in other cases have produced millions of coins. So it is impossible to know for sure but estimates can be made so that you can determine a rough average.

The first thing you need to determine is how a coin was made. Based on what I know about Ottoman issues of the late 1700s they were struck in an open sided screw press.

US Bust Half dollars were also made on an opensided screw press and Overton lists the number of dies used each year and the total production. A little math provides estimates of the number of coins made by a typical die. I did just one year 1830. There were 4.7 million coins made using 15 obverse and 20 reverse dies. (The hammer dies typically last a shorter period of time in practice.) So it works out to 250-300K per die.

I think that number is a conservative total.

Next you also need to know the total annual number of coins made. That is a lot more difficult for the coin in question. If you know the number of coins made divide that by about 250,000 and you will have a rough number of dies made.

Based on the size of the Ottoman Empire and the cost of Piastre today - I have to believe that there were far more than 2 dies. But how many more ??