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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;dougsmit, post: 5311356, member: 19463&quot;]I defer to [USER=31620]@maridvnvm[/USER] on all things IMP.&nbsp; That is what was once called Laodicea ad Mare but most of the coins that read IMP with no following numeral were short flan and the II did not make it on the coin.&nbsp; Yours, however, clearly has no II and is also missing the VG of AVG.&nbsp; The easy answer is to call it unofficial.&nbsp; I do not know what is the truth and I firmly believe that most of the people pushing renaming of the mints are more interested in discrediting the old ID&#039;s of Harold Mattingly by replacing his wrong guesses with wrong guesses of their own without having solid evidence that convinces me that they are &#039;correct&#039; rather than just &#039;different&#039;.&nbsp; My phantasy answer is a series of travelling mints and I will keep &#039;believing&#039; in that without &#039;proof&#039; until someone comes up with what I consider a reasonable explanation that includes a lot of coins that have not been properly addressed so far.&nbsp; I am perfectly OK with calling your coin &quot;Laodicea Old Style&quot; using the quotes to indicate that we do not have a strong idea what we are doing.&nbsp; Mattingly and his generation did not understand the ground rules that produced this coinage.&nbsp; We knew that thirty years ago when I was corresponding with the late Roger Bickford-Smith.&nbsp; Part of my phantasy is that Roger would have devoted his life to this and would have found the answer.&nbsp; I am an amateur hack; I do not work at a museum; I am not being paid as a professional numismatist; I see no reason any of you should share my phantasies. </p><p><br /></p><p>Below is an example of a coin that seems to end in IMP but shows the expected II way over past the point of the bust.&nbsp; &#039;Rules&#039; made in Rome in 2nd century or in London in the 20th century get in the way of understanding truth more than they serve to clarify the situation.</p><p>[ATTACH=full]1224274[/ATTACH][/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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