HOW IS A HAMMERED COIN PRODUCED Ever since their invention in the 7th century BC coins have nearly always been made of metal . Metal working demands considerable skill, patience and technology, I don’t think you can ever appreciate how beautiful a hammered coin is until you actually hold one in your hand. Making metal into coins is also complicated, both in design and production. Quality control and consistency are very important . Each coin has to be near identical to the next, so that people accept that they are worth the same amount of money. To start the process of producing a hammered coin the metal has to be extracted from its natural state, often by mining, the metal would then be made into blanks by beating ingots into small flat sheets and trimming the edges with a cutting tool to create a blank disc of the desired metal. Blanks were also created round by being sawn off a circular ingot; or even by sieving molten metal to produce round blobs or discs These techniques required extra work with a hammer to ensure they were thin and flat. You would then need a die which is produced from iron but had a steel face which would contain the design. The die would have been made in upper and lower sections. the lower section of the die would be much more solid than the upper, maybe with a point at one end to enable it to be embed into a strong stable surface. The lower die would have been held in your hand so would have been thinner and lighter. The less important reverse image of the coin would usually have been placed on the upper die because it took the full force of the blow and the obverse image of the coin on the lower section. The blank would have been placed between the upper and lower die and struck very firmly to produce the coin. 
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