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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;dougsmit, post: 1961326, member: 19463&quot;]My die cutter license is a matter that truly changed my life.&nbsp; I refer to the question of whether there were stirrups shown on a few coins of Constantius II long before stirrups were used by the Romans.&nbsp; How it became life changing for me is that it provided me the excuse to upload my very first web page in February 1997.</p><p><br /></p><p>My friend Victor Failmezger was working on his book on late Roman coins and showed me what he considered evidence of stirrups on some falling horsemen coins from the Antioch mint.&nbsp; What he saw was a dotted line running down the leg of the barbarian horseman.&nbsp; A few coins even showed something going around the foot.&nbsp; The user of this dotted line (a rope or whatever it was) was a tribesman enemy of Rome and some tribes were known to have used stirrups even though they were not known or, perhaps, appreciated by Romans.&nbsp; The theory is that the die cutter might have been a barbarian or might have seen one using a stirrup and put it on the coins he cut.&nbsp;&nbsp; The mint bosses might not even have known what the rope was.&nbsp; Roman that saw people riding with stirrups would not necessarily copied the idea.</p><p>[ATTACH=full]346100[/ATTACH] [ATTACH=full]346101[/ATTACH]</p><p>[ATTACH=full]346125[/ATTACH] </p><p>I decided to start my web page with two articles.&nbsp; One was to be about Septimius Severus and the other was to be about something &#039;not Sev&#039;:</p><p><a href="http://www.forumancientcoins.com/dougsmith/notsev.html" target="_blank" class="externalLink ProxyLink" data-proxy-href="http://www.forumancientcoins.com/dougsmith/notsev.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.forumancientcoins.com/dougsmith/notsev.html</a></p><p><br /></p><p>The original idea was to replace each page after a week with a new pair of &#039;Sev&#039; and &#039;notSev&#039; pages but, at the last minute I decided not to destroy the first page pair but to add to it.&nbsp; The main reason for doing the pages was to learn to code HTML.&nbsp; There was no demand online for amateur articles on ancient coins.</p><p><br /></p><p>Since 1997, there have been a lot of studies on the dress and appearance of the falling horsemen.&nbsp; The question of whether or not these coins actually show early stirrups or not will never be answered for sure.&nbsp; I believe they are stirrups.&nbsp; Many high level experts think that is just plain silly.&nbsp; That matters not to me.&nbsp; For this post is suffices to say that these pigtailed riders have dress characteristics including a line of dots running down their legs.&nbsp; You can say it is decorative lace.&nbsp; To me it shows stirrups.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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