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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;otlichnik, post: 5361066, member: 109731&quot;]This is a <b>key</b> point that&nbsp; think applies to any and all coinage.&nbsp; Be it Huo Chuans, Wu Zhu, Kai Yuan, Northern Song, or late Roman like FEL TEMP REPARATIO, or anything else.</p><p><br /></p><p>The biggest challenge this of course raises is that we simply don&#039;t always know what is important and what is not!&nbsp; Some features obviously imply things while others do not.&nbsp; But as outsiders, sometimes removed by thousands of years, it can be hard to be sure which is which.</p><p><br /></p><p>This is further complicated by the fact that while intentional variations are extremely important, as they were, well intentional, and must convey certain information, some unintentional variations are important in that they can be considered diagnostic variations - in other words variations that definitely tell us something even if they weren&#039;t intentional.&nbsp; </p><p><br /></p><p>And of course we often don&#039;t know for sure what was intentional.&nbsp; Do two far-removed mints in China use different characters to signal that they are different mints?&nbsp; This was certainly the case in the Qing era.&nbsp; Or is it simply that they had different though distinguishable styles?&nbsp; Hard to be sure for some of the earlier coinage.</p><p><br /></p><p>With something like late Roman FEL TEMP REPARATIO Falling horsemen it can be easier.&nbsp; There are some changes that appear to be deliberate: the direction the fallen horseman faces; some purely artistic/stylistic elements that are diagnostic (i.e. we can look and say - product of the Rome mint or the Alexandria mint - by overall &#039;feel&quot;); and yet there are also elements that appear unintentional and are un-diagnostic and simply reveal the variation by engraver and die - is the hat tall or short, is the brim wide or narrow?</p><p><br /></p><p>It also, as you know, takes time to train the eye.&nbsp; Once you point out how important that blob on the edge of the rim of the Huo Chuans is to a newcomer of course they will start looking for every inconsistency or &quot;pattern&quot; in the reverse field too. It takes a while to see enough examples to realize that one is common and appears to be statistically significant, while many other little dots and blobs turn out to be one off nothings.</p><p><br /></p><p>Anyway, long post but I find myself thinking a lot about this exact issue and am fascinated how the same intellectual issue applies to such diverse types of coinage.</p><p><br /></p><p>SC[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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