Message:

<p>[QUOTE=&quot;dougsmit, post: 694576, member: 19463&quot;]I&#039;m embarassed that I missed the small coin being Greek but I&#039;ll stick my neck out again on the larger coin.&nbsp; Carausius is one of those rulers that comes in various degrees of barbarous.&nbsp; If you want to be hard line about it, all of his coins could be called unofficial since he was a usurper or pirate who took over Britain and Northern Europe at a time that the mainstream Emperors were occupied elsewhere.&nbsp; His coins were produced from several mints and some are a great deal more refined looking than others.&nbsp; </p><p><img src="http://www.pbase.com/image/117620106.jpg" class="bbCodeImage wysiwygImage" alt="" unselectable="on" /></p><p>For comparison, I&#039;ll post a poor condition specimen of a more mainstream style coin (I have no idea what the reverse was on yours but this is the common Pax type).&nbsp; When this coin was made, Carausius was attempting to legitimize himself and promoted himself as one of the three genuine Roman Emperors as is shown by the abbreviation for Augusti here using AVGGG (two rulers would have been AVGG using the standards of that day).&nbsp; As I said in my previous post, barbarous imitations could be made many years later than the coin copied (and the ID of this one to Carausius is not obvious to me - I&#039;m not saying it is not but the coin is a bit far gone to be certain).&nbsp; The point is that coins were made to spend and coins in the far reaches of the empire could be required where there was no ready supply from outside.&nbsp; That produced a wide variety of imitations meant to be spent ranging from things we will disagree as to whether they are &#039;official&#039; or not to things that were obviously amateur (to the point that I&#039;d question the ID specifics).&nbsp; Looking at yours, I&#039;m suspecting the coin is double struck but that should have been mentioned when you bought the coin as should the ID since it was known to the previous owner (how is it you had to ask here if the coins came with full ID?).&nbsp; </p><p><br /></p><p>I apologize for the error on the &#039;Greek&#039; coin (perhaps a bit far north to be mainstream Greek but still not Roman for certain).&nbsp; The fake definitions link from Forvm posted above is important for all ancient collectors to understand.&nbsp; In US coinage, all mints look exactly alike except for a little letter called mintmark.&nbsp; Ancients don&#039;t work that way.&nbsp; Different mints have different styles and co-workers in the same mint might cut individual dies very differently.&nbsp; Some coins are obviously Friday afternoon quality while others are works of art.&nbsp; We do not even agree in every case where the mints were located or how many of them there were.&nbsp; Barbarous coins might be better considered like we consider Hard Times or Civil War tokens.&nbsp; They were made to fill a need when coins were in short supply.&nbsp; They are interesting.&nbsp; They may not be what you want if you are looking for a mainstream, genuine Roman coin.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

Your name or email address:

Do you already have an account?

• No, create an account now.
• Yes, my password is:
• Forgot your password?

Stay logged in