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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;Ed Snible, post: 3234844, member: 82322&quot;]Usually we only know a few things that happened in a particular city in ancient times.&nbsp; For example we might know that the Persians conquered the city in the year X BC, and the Greeks re-took the city in the year Y BC.</p><p><br /></p><p>If we see three different denomination sets for the city, and one looks kind of old-fashioned, and one is in a Persian weight standard, the numismatists of the 19th century just wrote that the old fashioned coins were &quot;before X BC?&quot;, the Persian weight coins were &quot;X to Y BC?&quot;, and the other coins were &quot;After Y BC?&quot;</p><p><br /></p><p>Eventually, with enough overstrikes we can confirm the relative ordering.&nbsp; Hoards showing the coins we think are earlier heavily worn mixed with mint state later coins also confirms the relative ordering.&nbsp; Eventually the &quot;?&quot; gets dropped.</p><p><br /></p><p>If we see dates ending in 00 or 50 it means we have no clue what happened in the city and made up numbers for a half-century based on artistic style.</p><p><br /></p><p>Sometimes there are events that affected the whole Greek world.&nbsp; You will see 480 BC given for a lot of coins.</p><p><br /></p><p>If the range is given as &quot;480 - 400 BC&quot; you should not expect that the coins trickled out yearly, like wheat pennies from 1909 to 1959.&nbsp; Probably there were a few big batches but we just don&#039;t know if they were at the start of the range, the end of the range, or even really in the range at all.</p><p><br /></p><p>For some coins there is no agreement and different catalogs give different ranges for the same types.</p><p><br /></p><p>Barclay Head was one of the most serious about putting coins into known periods.&nbsp; Look up the cities of your coins in his <i>Historia Numorum</i> (online at <a href="http://snible.org/coins/hn/" target="_blank" class="externalLink ProxyLink" data-proxy-href="http://snible.org/coins/hn/" rel="nofollow">http://snible.org/coins/hn/</a> ).&nbsp; Sometimes he explains his reasoning or at least names the periods.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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