I have created and posted an educational web site about Christian symbolism on Roman coins: http://esty.ancients.info/Christian/ChristianSymbols.html Here is one of the many types discussed on the pages: HOC SIGNO VICTOR ERIS (beginning at 7:00) ("With the sign, you will be victorious"). A 21 mm coin struck by Vetranio in AD 350. The whole site is new and I don't now how readers will react to it. There might be things I should do differently. I solicit corrections, comments, and suggestions. It is easy to make changes on web sites!
It will take a while to digest all this but my first suggestion would be links at the bottom to your coin homepage and a link there to this page so I could find it if I loose the link provided.
I look forward to reading the whole page. For starters, the "greater detail" link on the "early enigmatic type" does not work, and the "greater detail" link on the "early Christian legend" coin goes to the "early enigmatic type" discussion.
Doug and John, I appreciate your comments and have fixed the site to address them all. John, I hope those links work correctly now and Doug, I was going to link from the home page and back as soon as I knew the site worked, but I went ahead and did it now.
This is a problem I have with regularity on the web. Someone will ask a question that I know is answered on the web but I am driven to a search engine to find it. If I know that the matter is covered on a page by a certain author, I would prefer to go to their index and follow as few links as possible to get to the page that covers the matter. Sometimes the problem is the number of people posting in Blog format with indices only by date; sometimes it is a separation of educational and commercial pages (for example, your listings of coin catalogs with descriptions and your sales pages for catalogs you have for sale). Right now I am considering reworking the format of my index page in the hope of making it easier to find some specific topic. While considering how to do this, I am sensitive to options of what makes an index useful and what makes it less so. So many of my pages overlap or duplicate each other, it may be time to start taking down the dregs. First I have to decide if the problem in the format of the index or the material being indexed.
Well, I don't find your index page particularly over-saturated Doug. A random google search of 6 topics about ancient coins gave me your site 6 times on the first page of each search. Technically, you could have an index page that said nothing but "howdy" and code it with a thousand invisible key words that would draw the search engine spiders. I have a very intricate set of bookmarks for anything and everything to do with ancient coins. I never come across anything valuable without saving its location. Valentinian, those links are working now. Just out of curiosity, are all the coins pictured from your collection? If so, that's quite impressive.
Search engines can find interior pages even if they are not linked to a home. When spiders are drawn to a home page that lacks someplace to go on further, nothing is accomplished except incrementing counters. Of course there is the question on why people want others to visit their sites. If the main reason is to expose them to ads, it makes no difference if there is anything there to see or not.
the Constantine with coin with the chi-rho standard on the serpent is fantastic...have never seen that before.
On my "Christian symbols" site there is one type with a Christian connection that my original listing failed to mention-- the "eyes to heaven" bust of Constantine. It has no symbol, but should have been mentioned. I added it as Type 1.15 and it deserves a long discussion (which will appear eventually). http://esty.ancients.info/Christian/ChristianSymbols.html I remark that much of my interest in Roman coins with Christian symbolism arose from an old friend (now 86) who has recently asked me to sell his remaining coins. His collection emphasized coins with crosses. I am gradually listing them here: http://augustusmath.hypermart.net/Crosses.html Among many regular coins, that page has a few unlisted varieties (mostly with with crosses) that he was able to find by diligent searching over 50 years of collecting.
