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Message:: [QUOTE="lehmansterms, post: 4274660, member: 80804"]Since not everyone who might read this is an ancients specialist, an ancients "fan", or even an occasional aquisitor, I thought it might be helpful to point out that the officina designation characters on the majority of pieces issued from the eastern Roman mints (and occasionally at the western mints, too) are sequential letters of the Greek alphabet as it was used at the time. Additionally, they are the Greek numerals: A=1; B=2, Γ=3, Δ=4, ε=5, S=6, Z=7, H=8, Θ=9, Ι=10.(similar to the way letters are used as Roman numerals, LXIV, etc.) Interestingly, in Greek numerals "9" as a stand-alone is typically written as "Δε" (4+5) since the Romans (and many Greeks) were very superstitious about a number of things and associated the letter theta-Θ (Greek numeral nine) with "Thanatos", the Greek word for death, so they "fudged it" with a delta+epsilon combination.The "teens" were similarly created by adding a letter/numeral to "I", eg: IB=12, the 20's with K+numeral, 30's with Λ+numeral, etc.[/QUOTE]