I thought attributing would be a little easier than I find it now. I don't know the roman characters or emperors by portrait yet so its quite a draining task. I use wildwind.com which I find fairly useful but determining mints and emperors can be a pain. Im thinking it will get easier or maybe im doing it the hard way? Any suggestions on an easier way to do it? I just spent about 30 minutes on wildwind and under a lighted magnifier and was able to possibly get 5 done. #1 Valens, AE3, Siscia. 367-375 AD. DN VALEN-S PF AVG, pearl-diademed, draped, cuirassed bust right / SECVRITAS-REIPVBLICAE, Victory walking left, holding wreath and palm. Star over P in left field, dot over M in right field. Mintmark ASISC. RIC IX Siscia 15b, type xviii. #2 Valens, AE3, Siscia. 367-375 AD. DN VALEN-S PF AVG, pearl-diademed, draped, cuirassed bust right / SECVRITAS-REIPVBLICAE, Victory walking left, holding wreath and palm. Star over P in left field, dot over M in right field. Mintmark ASISC. RIC IX Siscia 15b, type xviii. #3Valens AE3. 364-367 AD. DN VALENS PF AVG, diademed, draped and cuirassed bust right / SECVRITAS REIPVBLICAE, Victory walking left, holding wreath and palm, star over A to left. Mintmark DASISC. Cohen 37 #4 Valens AE3. 365 AD. DN VALENS PF AVG, diademed draped and cuirassed bust right / GLORIA ROMANORVM, emperor walking right, head left, holding labarum and dragging bound captive behind him. Mintmark can be dot ASISC, dot BSISC or dot ΓSISC. Cohen 11. Variety of field marks.(DIFFERENT MINE HAS AN “A” in right field) #5 Valentinian I, AE3, Siscia. 367-375 AD. DN VALENTINI-ANVS PF AVG, pearl diademed, draped, cuirassed bust right / GLORIA RO-MANORVM, emperor walking right, holding labarum, dragging captive behind him. S in left field, star over D in right field. Mintmark BSISC. RIC IX Siscia 14a, type xiv. Chris
Generally, an excellent job on attributing these, particularly if all you are using is Wildwinds, which won't show you all the various combinations of mintmarks and control marks on the Siscia issues. You're very close. On #1 and #2, I'm not sure there's a dot over the M in the right field on the reverse. This would make these type xvii. Otherwise you've attributed the first two correctly. Here's the relevant section of RIC IX's table:
You have #3 right. It is Cohen 37. It sounds like you would like an RIC number and it's 7b, type vii. Here's the relevant part of the table in RIC:
#4 is very close. That's an R in the right field. Mintmark is •BSISC. That would make it RIC 14b, type x. You have #5 exactly right. Here's the relevant table:
thank you. these are easy in the grand scheme; however, there are may I cant identify the emperor 100% or 10%
You're doing fine and don't expect to be able to attribute all of the coins in group lots. I've had bulk lots where I couldn't identify the ruler in 10% or the mint in 30%. They just go in a jar of culls and I give them away to my students.
When I was new to ancients in the early 2000’s, I used to buy the uncleaned lots that were filled with LRBs. FWIW, The easiest way for me to ID them was using Late Roman Bronze Coinage by Carson, Kent, and Hill. As long as I could pick up some of the legends, I could usually ID many of them or at least narrow it down. Once narrowed down, it was much easier to check them against wildwinds. Initially, I had a lot of trouble with RIC because I couldn’t always ID the mint. I am a generalist when it comes to numismatics and it’s been a few years since I actively collected and studied ancients, but I really liked LRBC and it would still be my first “Go To” if I got some more of these. I haven’t seen it mentioned very often on the CT Ancient forum and wonder what others think about it for use on the “environmentally challenged” LRBs
thanks I'll check that book out. I also saw this website that matched by portrait and images. https://www.tesorillo.com/aes/home.htm
I use wildwinds.com mostly too. Lately I've been collecting coins of Roman Egypt (Alexandria) and use both wildwinds.com and the Dattari list, which was an exhaustive collection from around the turn of the 20th century - it's also available online.
Oldhoopster said: "When I was new to ancients in the early 2000’s, I used to buy the uncleaned lots that were filled with LRBs. FWIW, The easiest way for me to ID them was using Late Roman Bronze Coinage by Carson, Kent, and Hill. As long as I could pick up some of the legends, I could usually ID many of them or at least narrow it down." Oldhoopster touches on a most important point here. It's really startlingly easy to overlook the fact that if you take the time to read the legends on your coins (learn to read the letter-forms, learn "what to look for", etc.) you will be much farther along in the process than you would if what you're doing amounts to pattern-recognition in wildwinds. Usually, if readable, the legends will give you 100% of the information you need (along with details like bust style) to fully identify and reference LRB's. Wildwinds is a great resource - I use it all the time - but not for this sort of thing. For LRB's you'd do better to use the Helvetica spreadsheets. Hopefully you have access to MSExcel in some form or another? If you don't, there are free downloads of utility suites mirroring MSOffice apps including Excel - "Open Office" is one, there are others. The thing that really makes Helvetica worthwhile to use is that it employs an intuitive process of elimination based on what you can read. You start with a list of 100% of all the varieties/mints/rulers etc, for your given type, and as you make choices about what appears on your coin from a line of drop-down menus at the top of the grid. Every item you enter deletes all the types from the list which do not have that feature. If you can reasonably well read the legends, this is probably the fastest way for a beginner to get something like an accurate reference number for an accepted standard reference. LRBC is a terriffic resource, too. It was for many years an unofficial volume of RIC which covered a lot of the holes left before the publication of RIC vols. VII, VIII & X. It was even made the same size and shape format as the RIC books to easily fit on the same shelf. However, many find it quite daunting at first glance. It has a fairly steep learning curve, but it's a learning curve that's really worth expending the time and energy to familiarize yourself with the factors you will need to consider in attribution in general. It will arm you with a ton of useful information about things you need to look for and note like legend varieties, legend break varieties, bust types, field marks, etc. Unfortunately at first glance it can be, as I said, daunting. I know folks who compare their first glance at a page in LRBC as being similar to the graphic in the opening credits of "The Matrix" with incomprehensible columns of mixed characters streaming down all over the page and not a single photo or word of explanation on any of the grid pages. Stick a post-it note in between the sections I & II (pg. 40/41) where all the descriptions are listed and use it as a handy bookmark to get back to the lists from which the abbreviations for the types, etc, are chosen.
That's exactly what I did. Using the description pages, it was easy to narrow things down even if a lot of the characters in the legend wear illegible.
