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<p>[QUOTE="lehmansterms, post: 2846868, member: 80804"]The "ethnic" - the legend on the reverse naming the city or area of origin is pretty unlikely to end in an omega, although "...NΩΝ" is a very common ending due to being in the correct case in Greek to mean "Of (the named place)" IOW, the coin is saying it's legal money of "city-ending-in-NΩN"</p><p>This is all part of Murphy's Law of ancient coin identification. One of the corollaries is that the most important letters (the ones that vary, as opposed to being strictly formulaic or grammatical) are the letters most likely to be illegible. This is why late Roman obverse legends IRL may all-too-often read like "D N CON.......P F AVG" which narrows things down to half a dozen likely suspects, but <i>could be</i> any of them. </p><p>That said, if you were to rotate the reverse (or the image of the reverse) ~ 150º clockwise to bring it into the intended alignment, you would be looking at an ethnic beginning around 7:00-8:00 and ending around 5:00 - from the apparent spacing of the letters, there is only room for a few letters prior to the NΩN on the end, 6 or 7 tops. Try to see if you can make out any of the letters in the beginning and middle of the ethnic because it is there that you will find the origin, if it is ascertainable at all. The reverse type is quite likely to be Tyche (in Greek, Fortuna in Latin) which you can tell because she holds a rudder. A couple other deities or personifications might have a rudder, but are very much less commonly seen with that as their major attribute. This, unfortunately, tells us no more than we knew from the "...NΩN", since Tyche was about the single very most common deity/allegorical personification (possibly tied with Victory/Nike) to appear on the reverse of any Roman Provincial city coin.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>
[QUOTE="lehmansterms, post: 2846868, member: 80804"]The "ethnic" - the legend on the reverse naming the city or area of origin is pretty unlikely to end in an omega, although "...NΩΝ" is a very common ending due to being in the correct case in Greek to mean "Of (the named place)" IOW, the coin is saying it's legal money of "city-ending-in-NΩN" This is all part of Murphy's Law of ancient coin identification. One of the corollaries is that the most important letters (the ones that vary, as opposed to being strictly formulaic or grammatical) are the letters most likely to be illegible. This is why late Roman obverse legends IRL may all-too-often read like "D N CON.......P F AVG" which narrows things down to half a dozen likely suspects, but [I]could be[/I] any of them. That said, if you were to rotate the reverse (or the image of the reverse) ~ 150º clockwise to bring it into the intended alignment, you would be looking at an ethnic beginning around 7:00-8:00 and ending around 5:00 - from the apparent spacing of the letters, there is only room for a few letters prior to the NΩN on the end, 6 or 7 tops. Try to see if you can make out any of the letters in the beginning and middle of the ethnic because it is there that you will find the origin, if it is ascertainable at all. The reverse type is quite likely to be Tyche (in Greek, Fortuna in Latin) which you can tell because she holds a rudder. A couple other deities or personifications might have a rudder, but are very much less commonly seen with that as their major attribute. This, unfortunately, tells us no more than we knew from the "...NΩN", since Tyche was about the single very most common deity/allegorical personification (possibly tied with Victory/Nike) to appear on the reverse of any Roman Provincial city coin.[/QUOTE]
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