I've gotten quite a few FH lately, perhaps too many to share, and I'm still taking pics of them all but wanted to share a few. The first one is from Alres. Arles used P, S, and T for their officina with ARL and AR to indicate Arles (Arelatum), PARL for example. Later the city changed it's name Constantina, using CON instead of ARL in the ex. My new example has PAR dot F I'm not sure what the F stands for, probably just a control mark similar to the star and branch used by the mint though. I also have a FH with PAR dot L in the ex. The dot separates AR from L so I'd wager the L is a control mark as well vs being the L in ARL. It can be a confusing mint.
My next one I'll show is one of Steves coins. A nice early issue from Heraclea. Constantius II AE 2 24.75 mm 5.14g D N CONSTAN-TIVS P F AVG, Pearl-diademed, draped and cuirassed bust right / FEL TEMP RE-PARATIO, helmeted soldier standing left, spearing fallen horseman who is wearing a bowl-shaped helmet, clutching the horse's neck. Star in left field. Mintmark SMHA. Heraclea RIC VIII 67
Nice ones Randy!! You must have an incredible inventory FH gems. Thank you for sharing all the FH's that you do! I like looking at learning about the multitude of variations of FH's in your posts
I will remember that one as the "up-up-and-away!" coin. (In case it's only obvious to me, the spear-wielding soldier looks like he's about to take off... or maybe already has! No?) Very cool.
These are great coins and with the passion @randygeki brings to the table, it makes them even more interesting.
Great coins. I have loads of FTRs from uncleaned hoards but they are mostly of lower grade, as you might expect. What I often wonder about is how many coins did Constantius II strike? It must have been in the millions. I also often wonder what could be purchased with one of these coins. Outside of the Edict of Maximum Wages and Prices published by Diocletian I don't believe we have a good picture of this.
There has been a lot of scholarship devoted to the sizes of Greek issues, which are often well-documented issues that are small compared to Roman issues. By being valuable, Greek silver coins have been worth photographing in sale catalogs that are in major numismatic libraries. Those images, plus internet images, allow scholars to identify and count dies used for the issue. DeCallatay wrote two books assembling the data from numerous publications (sometimes Ph.D. theses) and they cover over 600 Greek issues including most of the famous ones. Using statistical techniques we can estimate how many dies were used in the issue. For example, one study found 683 examples of this well known large Macedonian type: Sear 1386. from 149 different obverse dies, which yields an estimated 190 dies originally (which is not very precise). If we accept 20,000 coins per die (a guess, but somewhat justified by evidence) that would make about 3,800,000 coins in that issue. Roman coins have not been studied as much because their numbers are so much greater that distinguishing their dies (more than hundreds of dies for a single design) in a study is almost impossible, as is gathering a good representative sample. You could do it with Otho (expensive enough to be photographed and rare enough to make a manageable sample). But it would be a huge amount of work to do it with FTR types. I imagine there are hundreds of "soldier-spearing-fallen-horseman" for every Greek silver of the above type. That suggests there were originally hundreds of millions made. Add in other issues of the time period and I wouldn't be surprised if there were originally a billion coins of Constantius II.
Been busy getting pics of these. Most of these were recently gifted to me (not sure if they mind if I name them or not so I'll just give them a big Thanks! a few I got myself.
