Solid Silver

A fourrée is a coin, most often a counterfeit, that is made from a base metal core that has been plated with a precious metal to look like its solid metal counter part. more...

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The term is normally applied to ancient silver plated coins such as the Roman denarius and Greek drachma, but the term is also applied to other plated coins.

Cicero mentions that the M. Marius Gratidianus, a praetor during the 80s BC, was widely praised for developing tests to detect false coins, and removing them from circulation. Gratidianus was killed under Sulla, who introduced his own anti-forgery law (lex Cornelia de falsis), that reintroduced serrated edges on precious metal coins, an anticounterfeiting measure that had been tried earlier. Serrated denarii, or serrati, which featured about 20 notched chisel mark on the edge of the coin, were produced to demonstrate the integrity of the coin. This effort was in vain, as examples of fourrée serrati attest.

Production

Production of fourrées began almost as early as the production of the first coins in Asia Minor in the 7th century BC. These coins were produced by people wishing to profit by producing a counterfeit containing less precious metal content than its purported face value. The most common method for producing a fourrée would be to take a flan of copper, wrap it with silver foil, heat it, and strike it with the dies. If the coin was sufficiently heated and struck hard enough, a layer of eutechtic (a mixture of 72% silver and 28% copper that has the lowest melting point of any mixture of these two metals) would be produced, fusing the layers together. Sometimes eutechtic was sprinkled between the layers to increase the bond, although determining which coins employed the added eutechtic method. Exposure of the deception was often due to wear at the high points of the coin, or moisture trapped between the layers that caused the foil to bubble and then break as the core corrodes.

A later method for making fourrées involved adding silver to the base metal coin after it had been struck. This method allowed for even less silver to be used, which became more important in order to make counterfeiting profitable as the official coinage was debased. The exact method that these coins were silvered is unclear although possible methods include dipping the coin in molten silver, brushing the coins with molten silver, or dusting the coin with powdered silver and heating it until the silver melted.

Detection

The easiest way to spot a fourrée is by weight, since a fourrée with a copper core would weigh noticeably less than a solid silver coin due to the lower density of copper. The opposite would be true for a fourrée with a lead core.

Another method to determine whether a coin was plated was listening to the sound produced by dropping the coin onto a hard surface since if the coin was solid silver it would have a distinctive ring. Although this was done by contemporary merchants, it is not recommended that this method be used on ancient coin since the coin could be damaged, especially since over time silver coins can become brittle if the silver begins to recrystallize.

Read more at Wikipedia.org