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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;dougsmit, post: 1921873, member: 19463&quot;]I received the coin that was holding up posting my series of 101 pages on my favorite coins so now I invite anyone interested in seeing the ancients I liked best at the moment I pushed the button to visit the index image and click on any coin (at random or selected with care) to see a write-up on why that particular coin made my list of favorites.&nbsp; Many have additional information about the coin and, time and mood allowing, I plan to add a bit more to some of them as well as to proofread what must be a comedy of errors.&nbsp; I should have more time because that last coin added from the last Pecunem sale should put me on the wagon for a while. </p><p><a href="http://www.forumancientcoins.com/dougsmith/favs.html" target="_blank" class="externalLink ProxyLink" data-proxy-href="http://www.forumancientcoins.com/dougsmith/favs.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.forumancientcoins.com/dougsmith/favs.html</a></p><p>There will be updates if I happen to buy a coin I like better than one of these. </p><p><br /></p><p>The last added coin (#4 on the list):</p><p>[ATTACH=full]330177[/ATTACH] </p><p>&quot;This is not My Favorite Coin. It is, however my most expensive coin and was purchased largely due to its relation to <a href="http://www.forumancientcoins.com/dougsmith/f01.html" target="_blank" class="externalLink ProxyLink" data-proxy-href="http://www.forumancientcoins.com/dougsmith/f01.html" rel="nofollow">#1</a>. My Favorite Coin copied the reverse from this coin of Pescennius Niger and details of that story have been told other places on my pages since the beginning in 1997 so I won&#039;t go into too much detail here.</p><p>You might think being my most expensive coin would be enough to earn a place on my list of favorites but this coin has credentials even better than that. Coins of Pescennius Niger range from scarce to rare. This is hard to explain since there are many variations and many types. Even examples that seem like they should be identical often show variations in spelling or the way abbreviations were executed. It is a bit unusual to find die duplicates since there are so many dies known and so few coins. The most likely explanation of this is that Septimius Severus demonetized and pulled from circulation all the coins of Pescennius Niger after his defeat at Issus in later 194 AD. Most of Pescennius&#039; coin were probably in the hands of his supporters and many of them died either in the war or in the cleansing that followed. We have no records that suggests how this was accomplished but there are simply too many suggestions that there once were many denarii and then there were few.</p><p><br /></p><p>This example is from 194 AD and shows a COS II date on the obverse honoring Pescennius&#039; taking of a second consulship at Antioch in 194 in opposition to the one Septimius took at Rome. The two had each held their first consulship back in 190 AD. Recently there has been much discussion about the number and locations of mints for Pescennius denarii but this one, and all COS II coins, is most likely from Antioch.</p><p><br /></p><p>While I said it is not easy to find die duplicates of Pescennius coins, I was able to find a nicer specimen online from this die set. That coin confirms the legends IMP CAES C PESC NIGER IVS AVS COS II / VICTOR IVST AVG. Most interesting to me (I feel particularly fortunate to have found this particular coin!) is the use of AVS instead of AVG on the obverse. My coin <a href="http://www.forumancientcoins.com/dougsmith/f02.html" target="_blank" class="externalLink ProxyLink" data-proxy-href="http://www.forumancientcoins.com/dougsmith/f02.html" rel="nofollow">#2</a> on this list shows AVS on the reverse. Realizing that the die cutter was probably not literate in Latin and Greek has different forms to represent letters G and S, perhaps this shown not be a surprise. I will point out, however, that there are historical uses of abbreviations including the last letter of the shortened word so I can not be certain that this S is a simple substitution for the G.</p><p><br /></p><p>This is not My Favorite Coin; it is not even #2 but it was the coin I bought last before posting these 99 and 1/2 favorites. I strongly suspect it will be quite a while before it gets bumped from the list.&quot;[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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