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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;lehmansterms, post: 2693319, member: 80804&quot;]Mikey - Unfortunately, it&#039;s not so simple as telling that a Lincoln cent is pre- or post-1958 by checking the reverse.&nbsp; The Alexander types were eventually struck at literally scores - possibly hundreds - of mints. Many of them in places where the locals probably would, if not necessarily have killed you for saying it, at least have been very insulted and angered had you called them &quot;Greek&quot;. Greek culture had very little of anything like a universal cultural identity - unlike Roman culture.&nbsp; Greek city-states were constantly at each others throats. It wasn&#039;t until Philip&#039;s and Alexander&#039;s time that some form of unification even occurred to them, beyond trying to recruit a neighbor to help fight the group over the hill in the next valley.</p><p>They were not all cooperating together to turn out a homogeneous product. Some copied the others carefully for various reasons which were mostly economic/trade based.&nbsp; Others had their reasons for divergences from the otherwise universally recognizable product.&nbsp; Some were even struck on different weight standards, among other variations.</p><p>We are seeing these things from a viewpoint in which almost nothing we touch or see is unique. One-offs, when they occur, are something special and unusual. You must remember that there was virtually no continuity of stereotypy in everyday objects in the late 1st millennium BC.&nbsp; Once a mold or set of dies broke - and these were about the only way that anything approaching exact copies could be made - there would never again be objects exactly like those produced from them.</p><p>The dating of the various types, like their attribution to specific mint-cities, was accomplished by logical deductive means using things like statistics generated from carefully recorded hoard evidence and findspots.</p><p>All of this is really a &quot;best guess&quot; scenario, since there are no primary source historical documents to consult on minutiae like the exact details of one issue or another. The coins themselves must stand as their own documentation.&nbsp; Opinions about dates and origins are liable to change on the basis of a new hoard find - or a new interpretation of existing data - at any time.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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