I always wonder why that is, they are copying something that exists, so why not copy it correctly? You see it with knock off electronics and such too, all the text will be there, but it won't be centered correctly, or a slightly different font will be used. In these times it's not any harder to do it correctly than it is to do it slightly incorrectly.
It just seems like they let things degenerate because they weren't trying to do art but just do things the way they'd always done them, with no controls on data degradation between generations.
The tooling was improving, becoming more detailed and complex over time. Nothing was staying the same over the generations. The coins changed in the midst of technological revolution.
The article is full of special pleading for the Celts being capable of making good copies, but refraining from doing so because they didn't ever feel like it and were permanently swept up by the abstract muse.
> Instead, it’s thought that the dies were larger than the flans [blanks] so that part of the image always resided in the unseen spiritual world that the Celts worshiped so much.
How about they just weren't keen on thinking ahead? Then they make the dies first, and as an afterthought they make the blanks the correct weight. This would also explain how Apollo was mostly hair - start engraving hair, get carried away, now coin is full of hair, cram a face in the remaining space. But no, no, they were in superb control of every aspect of metalwork at all times, and anything that seems like a fuck-up was actually spirituality.
I can accept that part of the reason for abstract coins is that they weren't motivated to make accurate copies, but I think also they couldn't.
If you reject abstract from Celtic culture, you reject the Celts. The Dagda isn't exactly some solid figure. They're an artistic people, in everything from their laws to... Their coins.
And as most family meals also intentionally left one part unfinished... For a deeply spiritual people, maybe you shouldn't be rejecting it out of hand.
Neither of those punishments banned the individual from the tuatha. They weren't exiled. They were still allowed to speak and be heard. They were still allowed to buy and sell. But they were no longer allowed to worship, or to create.
Some of the copies require as much effort as the originals though.
>This would also explain how Apollo was mostly hair - start engraving hair, get carried away, now coin is full of hair, cram a face in the remaining space.
That's silly, you could easily start over if ran out of space.
That's an interesting take considering we still marvel at their abstract art and craftsmanship in metals thousands of years later, and contemporary artists and manufactures still copy it.
Let me give one familiar modern example: logos. If they are graphical, generally you need to put some work in to understanding what they mean.
You start seeing it in everything the more you learn.
There is a curious thing with this "branch", I'm not sure if it's the same in the Celtic one. The last time I talked to people researching this, I was told that: a. The findings are mostly unique, it's hard to find two copies of the same coin. Sometimes obverse of one coin could be found on another, but reverses don't match. b. These coins are not cast, they are minted through "hammering", which requires a stamp. However, not a single stamp has been found so far. A much easier way to make currency out of existing one would be to just slap existing coin into some clay, make a casting mold and just pour molten metal into it.
This of course is more of a curiosity/rumor level, I don't have any qualifications to back it up.
[1]: http://barbarous-imitations.narod.ru/ (apologize for a .ru website, but it's the best catalogue to my knowledge.)
Like maybe coins are rare enough that they're not completely fungible, there is a slight preference for being able to know which one is which?
Say, people want to have affordances to trace the provenance if that starts to matter.
It could also be a legitimate aesthetic preference for currency units to be unique rather than uniform.
Maybe uniformity is hard but why make the dies much bigger than they need to be and use different parts?
Striking is downstream of casting, technologically because you need to make harder things and perform extra steps to do that.
I sometimes sit and think how different the world might be if Caesar was defeated in Gaul, and if the Roman State religion (Catholicism) hadn't spread a few centuries later.
dr_dshiv•8mo ago