On coin weights

[Brootse]

The Guide to Glorantha 1 says that lunars weigh 0.2 troy oz, ie. about 6g, while the Runequest Roleplaying in Glorantha says that lunars weigh about 4g or 1/8 of an ounce. Which is it?

[jajagappa]

1 hour ago, Brootse said:

The Guide to Glorantha 1 says that lunars weigh 0.2 troy oz, ie. about 6g, while the Runequest Roleplaying in Glorantha says that lunars weigh about 4g or 1/8 of an ounce. Which is it?

Obviously the former are what the Etyries merchants calibrate their scales to while the latter are what your average adventuring party receives - well clipped by cunning clan chiefs.

[Brootse]

26 minutes ago, jajagappa said:

Obviously the former are what the Etyries merchants calibrate their scales to while the latter are what your average adventuring party receives - well clipped by cunning clan chiefs.

Hah, those would be quite clipped coins. i wonder how clipped were the ancient coins?

[womble]

How about a nice round metric 5g...?  Is the difference going to matter very often? ("That King's Ransom, paid in Bolgs is going to take 6 carts to shift, not 5...")

 

[Brootse]

6 minutes ago, womble said:

How about a nice round metric 5g...?  Is the difference going to matter very often? ("That King's Ransom, paid in Bolgs is going to take 6 carts to shift, not 5...")

 

Enquiring minds just want to know

Edited August 17, 2018 by Brootse

[styopa]

I think the idea of even gram-precision in bronze-age coinage is not likely unless we postulate some sort of Issarian magical forging and or a set of spells that can calculate the actual silver in debased coinage/counterfeiting, etc.  These are roman denarii.

[PhilHibbs]

Issaries has a rune spell for creating coins, "Coin Wheel" will extrude a Wheel out of a lump of gold, and an Issaries-blessed market should prevent anyone from deliberately clipping or debasing.

[Joerg]

19 minutes ago, PhilHibbs said:

Issaries has a rune spell for creating coins, "Coin Wheel" will extrude a Wheel out of a lump of gold, and an Issaries-blessed market should prevent anyone from deliberately clipping or debasing.

You're confusing that with Lokarnos, aren't you?

Minting coins with somewhat constant weight isn't all that hard, and you will find that coins from a not even so narrow time of production will be rather even. Beating the obverse (and later the reverse) into the coin with dice is a process without any significant loss of material, so as long as your raws are cast somewhat evenly, you can use those coins as weights.

Trust in coin traditionally was limited. The Scandinavian markets adapted to coins only after decades of contact with the Hanseatic League, and money changers made many a coin just by collecting foreign coin and translating it into locally accepted specie (and vice versa), for a fee, assaying the degree of valuable metal in the foreign coins and looking out for counterfeits.

Now the Bronze Age trade didn't know coinage, that's one of the many Iron Age anachronisms in Glorantha. But there were other means of payment, like salary, the distribution of packets of salt, or somewhat standardized oxhide ingots of copper or tin. Or certain sea-shells cut to beads of a certain size, on strings.

If you want to give weights, maybe karat (number of carob tree seeds) might have been the better way than troy ounces.

Edited August 20, 2018 by Joerg

[PhilHibbs]

31 minutes ago, Joerg said:

You're confusing that with Lokarnos, aren't you?

Yes.

[Austin]

5 hours ago, styopa said:

I think the idea of even gram-precision in bronze-age coinage is not likely

As Joerg mentioned, Bronze Age trade didn't have use of coinage. Coinage first shows up in Anatolia c. 600BCE. In order to pay taxes, to believe it or not... Sort of a "royal stamp that the king says this is X weight!" which developed from ingots into coins over time. At least, according to the history I read some time ago (Kraay's Archaic and Classical Greek Coins for anyone wondering; it studies large chunks of the Mediterranean).

There was also a fun story in there with coin weights; apparently the Athenian owl was so reliably weighed, that some Persian satraps later put the same owl motif on their coins, because that was the image people trusted in a largely non-literate populace who just saw the pictures. This was the Athens of the Peloponnesian War (late 5th century BCE). Because people have been nitpicky about prices and money and taxes literally for all of recorded history.