Although it's far from a scarce coin I enjoy looking at everything. I probably could get one from each officina with some time and money but for now I need to figure out what this is. Is this Z? I suppose I can't see the bottom rung. no dot. CLEMENTINA TEMP Thanks, Evan I have more late bronzes to go through tonight, there are some which I can't make out the emperor. Maybe I will have more to ask so maybe we can keep it to this thread. \
I take it that you are trying to collect the officina set of Antioch. You have drifted away to Cyzicus here as that is where this coin is minted - RIC 905. The letter in the centre field here is a T. Regards, Martin
Ok, understood. I see the T easily now, thank you. I saw the XXI, matching mine of Antioch and I suppose I was confused. Now how did you identify it as Cyzicus? I thought that Cyzicus itself would have had a different mintmark rather than the XXI that is on both of my coins of this type. I guess I don't see the Cyzicus mintmark. Is the officina mark the identifier here? Just thinking. I don't expect an answer to everything, anyway.
The problem with many coins of Probus is that there are examples that appear to have potentially identical attributions based on legends, types, busts etc. but the style of the coin is completely different. Many collectors (and dealers) struggle with this. I have been collecting Probus coins for many years and the stylistic differences jump out at me. The following page from probvs.net shows you a range of RIC 905s from Cyzicus for you to compare the style of your example and there is a T//XXI in there for you to see too. I am not sure what you mean by "the Cyzicus mintmark" as many many mints simply used XXI as the value mark and there is no consistently used uniquely identifying mark for a particular mint. https://probvs.net/probvs/R905/R905.html The style of a coin from Antioch would be much closer to my following examples:- compared with some of my Cyzicus examples or Siscia Regards, Martin
mixed up the coins I was speaking of. I was thinking of the SMKΔ and other marks of the coins of later times. I'm still learning got it now
I always found it 'interesting' that the mints often felt the need to indicate the workshop number but not the city. It may not be the way we would have done it but they did what struck them as important. Cyzicus was one of the mints that did list the city (Moneta Cyzicus) on some coins but not on this one. We would like to know why but that is not likely anytime soon.
