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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;Inspector43, post: 4270857, member: 89213&quot;][USER=82549]@gsimonel[/USER] I sent your response to Dane at Helvitica since he was the one who offered my initial description and stated that it would be entered into his catalog as R4. This is what he sent back.</p><p><br /></p><p>They explained it relatively well.</p><p><br /></p><p>There are 203 &quot;soldiers with two standards&quot; coins Cyzicus listed in RIC (including the additions in my XLS list). These were struck by a number of different emperors.</p><p><br /></p><p>But of those 203, only 4 are known of Constantius II which have a star before the mintmark, so Star SMK.. something.</p><p><br /></p><p>The officina is the mint workshop which struck the coins. Most mints had more than one workshop, in fact Antioch had up to 15 at one point in time!</p><p><br /></p><p>On these later Roman bronzes, these workshops are denoted by a letter such as A, B, Gamma, Delta etc. for 1,2,3,4 and this is usually (but not always) at the end of the mintmark after the abbreviation for the mint.</p><p><br /></p><p>(This was&nbsp; form of quality control, so if some really awful coins went into circulation, or dies were stolen and used by the thieves, the authorities knew who to blame. This form of Quality Control was introduced under Claudius II).</p><p><br /></p><p>So a mintmark with, say, SMKB was struck in Cyzicus (SMK meaning the sacred mint of Kyzikos - the Greek name of the town) and officina 2 (B).</p><p><br /></p><p>SMH Delta, would be Heraclea, officina 4.</p><p><br /></p><p>SMNA would be Nicomedia, officina 1.</p><p><br /></p><p>SMTSB would be Thessalonica, officina 2.</p><p><br /></p><p>Lyons, Trier and London were three exceptions which come to mint - they used the first letters of &quot;Primus=first, Secundus=second, Tertius=third and usually before the abbreviated mint name. So you get mintmarks such as PLN (first officina of London, actually they only had one!), SLG for second officina at Lyons (called &quot;Lugdunum&quot; back then) or STR for second officina of Trier.</p><p><br /></p><p>Now, your coin *type*, RIC VII Cyzicus 113 with the star before the mintmark is listed *in RIC* only with star SMK gamma (officina 3) star SMK delta (officina 4) star SMKS (officina 6) but not with star SMKA (officina 1), so for some reason, they needed to use the additional officina 1 to make these, seeing as they were apparently only struck in officinae 3, 4 and 6.</p><p><br /></p><p>Perhaps this is the amongst the first very few of this type that were ever struck and after the basic dies were engraved, they asked officina 1 to strike a few with their mark to see how they looked, then handed them over to workshops 3, 4 and 6 for the main output.</p><p><br /></p><p>So this is why it is rare. Officina A is not in RIC and there are only a couple documented.</p><p><br /></p><p>Does this help about what they wrote ?</p><p><br /></p><p>best wishes</p><p><br /></p><p>Dane[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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