i have to agree...but that bust is a work of art..as is the reverse..maybe @dougsmit could ring in when he gets a chance..
Excellent barbaric portrait and great reverse. I do love their attempts at Latin. Though, I suppose if those who you are trading the coins with don't read Latin it doesn't really matter. Here's my most recent barbarous coin (not nearly as handsome as yours but just as grumpy looking)
That's a fine coin. If it was on eBay, I would have totally skimmed by it since the portrait is done well.
Same obverse die as these in my own collection. It forms part of a sub-series that I actively collect. The obverse legend reads IMP CA L SE SEV PEVR (sic) AVG COS I-I The reverse type occurs within this series but none of my 3 examples come from the same die as the op .
This is one of several 'odd' coins from the Syrian mints or operations that captured enough of their style that I could accept them as official. Spelling is not a high point of these mints. I still believe in the concept of travelling mints that used a mix of staff and local talent. I will not live to see this one answered to my satisfaction. There is more about this material that is not known than we realized 10 or 50 years ago. It is easy to write off anything not understood as 'barbarous' but harder to explain what we see in a manner that seems satisfactory. The coin needs to belong to someone who will preserve it until such a time that the series has been properly studied.
Just as additional information I have identified 9 of these odd obverse dies which I have annotated as O1 to O9 for my records and the coin above is annotated as O8. I have obtained about 30 coins across these 9 obverse dies. I have no evidence that they are linked to each other but am undertaking a long term study of the dies to see if I can find suitable die linkages of the reverse to other known issues to try and place these with the outputs of other known mints. Just for completeness I illustrate the other 9 obverse dies below. O1 - IMP CA L SE SEV PER AVG COS II O2 - IMP CA L SEP SEV PER AVG COS II O3 - IMP CA L SEP SEV PER AVG COS II 04 - IMP CA L SE SEV PER AVG COS II 05 - IMP CA L SEP SEV PER AVG COS II 06 - IMP CA L SEP SE_V PER AVG COS II O7 - OP and my examples above - IMP CA L SE SEV PEVR (sic) AVG COS I-I O8 - IMP CA L SEP S-EV PER AVG COS - II O9 - IMP CA L SE SEV PER AG COS II (also shared above)
