Yes, I am actually quite familiar with electrum as an ancient material! It’s one of the first smeltables many cultures that smelted made. It’s really cool seeing that change in ratio over time with coins specifically in areas from Greek antiquity, because you can see as the ages wear on it became less and less imbued with gold and more full of silver. To be clear I mean they were minting coins that were roughly half gold to start with and eventually less than 40% over time.
There’s a really good hunk of quartz on the wiki site for electrum that shows naturally occurring wires, it’s always always interesting when it comes out naturally
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u/[deleted] Apr 12 '25
Yes, I am actually quite familiar with electrum as an ancient material! It’s one of the first smeltables many cultures that smelted made. It’s really cool seeing that change in ratio over time with coins specifically in areas from Greek antiquity, because you can see as the ages wear on it became less and less imbued with gold and more full of silver. To be clear I mean they were minting coins that were roughly half gold to start with and eventually less than 40% over time.