Ordered this a week ago, arrived today 75 uncleaned ancients for 37.50. Already found a silver coin. The last one seems t be greco-bactrian/indo
Lucky you. The tracking number on my Balbus denarius says the item is delayed. I'm happy you found some silver. That is very unusual in uncleaned lots. Keep us posted on the cleaning process. It's always fun to see what turns up in these. I wish you luck. Hopefully you'll find something rare or really interesting
Thats a lot of coins to clean, you must have a lot of patience to be doing that. Keep us posted whenever you clean one up and Id'ed.
Why is it whenever we only retain three letters of a legend they tend to be AVG? Talk us through your process to ID the coin.
Facial profiles on coins of this era are generic - nothing like the realistic profiles of the earlier Roman coins. You really need some more legend for a definitive attribution.
This website will be very helpful for you when trying to identify late Roman bronzes with incomplete information: http://www.tesorillo.com/aes/_rev/index1i.htm
IMO Valens is a good guess. He is one that used that reverse and the loose spacing between the letters that we have suggest it is more likely a short name like Valens than a long one like Valentinian. I don't see the likelihood of a certain ID so I'd say you did as well as can be expected given the coin. You paid 50 cents for the coin and got 50 cents worth at a minimum. Good luck with the other 74. This page might help if you want to try for the mint by style. http://esty.ancients.info/ricix/type2i.html
I tried using the Tesorillo site's "By Reverse Type" and came up with Jovian as a best guess (by clicking each of the first three images shown in the image below, from this page: Of the first three reverse legends shown, I could best imagine VICTORIA ROMANORVM given what we can see. Jovian is the only one who issued that. I completely disregarded the portrait style (except for diadem type) because in this era they all look alike to me. If the reverse legend is RESTITVTOR REIPUBLICAE or RESTITVTOR REIP, the coin could be from Valentinian I, Valens, Jovian, or Gratian. It is very possible that there are other important factors I haven't considered.
