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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;dougsmit, post: 3343557, member: 19463&quot;]I believe we need further study on the question of mints.&nbsp; When I was a kid, every town of any size had a CocaCola bottling plant that cranked out soda for local distribution.&nbsp; The first use bottles were marked on the bottom with the name of the town but bottles were washed and refilled so you could not tell where the soda inside was made.&nbsp; Kids loved to look under their bottle and see who had one farthest from home.&nbsp;&nbsp; Sasanian mints were similar.&nbsp; They had a lot of them.&nbsp; Not every ruler used every mint and the idea of marking the coins did not start until Peroz but style differences are there earlier.&nbsp; I have not made a study of these.&nbsp; </p><p><br /></p><p>While I like the three divisions idea, it has to be modified a bit to allow for quality variations in art or workmanship from town to town.&nbsp; Those of us who will only have a coin of fine style will be interested in a few of the mints that had a top notch crew and might reject the rarities that specialists would value most highly.&nbsp; Modern coins and Coke bottles may have been marked with a city of origin name but the style of San Francisco CA and Philadelphia PA were identical.&nbsp; We don&#039;t even have certain knowledge of the city names represented by Sasanian initials.&nbsp; If you see a number of coins from the sme mint you get the idea that a specialist might learn to recognize one mint from another without reading the mint marks.&nbsp; I like good style as much as the next guy but I find myself drawn as well to cities that I have not seen before or those that played a role in history.&nbsp; I was disappointed in a recent purchase of a two volume work on Sasanian coins that had thousands of pictures of coins accompanied by almost no information and no links to history or text explaining much of anything.&nbsp; Its authors set out to show all the coins in their museum but did little to further knowledge as I would have hoped. Sasanian coins can be collected either way.&nbsp; We can care or not that, for example, Khusru II in year 25 captured Jerusalem.&nbsp; We can look at the coin below as having a common mint city with decent style, a weak strike on the right attendant or a year date of minor note.&nbsp; </p><p>[ATTACH=full]885434[/ATTACH] </p><p><br /></p><p>More of us might like the history of the year 38 below. Khusru II was killed that year.&nbsp; I have not become much of a student of Sasanian but I most certainly see a field with moe to study than will fit into a lifetime of a person much younger than I am.&nbsp;&nbsp; At my current level, I only hope to read correctly the mints and date information. </p><p>[ATTACH=full]885436[/ATTACH][/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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