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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;dougsmit, post: 1130267, member: 19463&quot;]Ceasarea had some skillful die cutters.&nbsp; The coins, both silver and bronze, are usually dated with ET (etoyc+year) followed by the regnal year for the main ruler.&nbsp; Caracalla as a boy would be dated by the years for his father, Septimius so ET IZ would be year 17 or 209 AD.&nbsp; My similar drachm is ET E or year 5=198 and shows a much younger boy Caracalla.&nbsp;&nbsp; My coin is less cleaned compared to most you see and has the black color appropriate for a silver coin that age.&nbsp; Ancient silver that are not at least dark gray have been cleaned (perhaps a couple hundred years ago if they have a pretty gray tone).</p><p><br /></p><p>Greek numerals were unlike the ones we use today in that they had a different letter code for 1 than they used of 10 or 100 and, therefore, needed no zeros to hold spaces.&nbsp; I was 10, K was 20, M was 40 and is commonly seen on the reverse of Byzantine 40 nummi coins.&nbsp; P is 100 so PIA and AIP were equally 111 while PA or AP would be 101 since order made no difference and a zero need not be represented.&nbsp; </p><p><br /></p><p>My Septimius with the less usual Nike reverse is dated ER and there is dispute whether the R was supposed to be A or B (1 or 2).&nbsp; The ET quickly replaced the plain E as the abbreviation for &#039;year&#039;.&nbsp; Want more on the topic:</p><p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_numerals" target="_blank" class="externalLink ProxyLink" data-proxy-href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_numerals" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_numerals</a>[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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