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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;Curtis, post: 24608423, member: 26430&quot;]Congratulations on the very interesting rarity &amp; on the good research!</p><p><br /></p><p>The AE As is a great area for collecting. I can&#039;t find a reference now (though hinted at in the Intro to BMCRE 1), but I believe I&#039;ve read that the AE As was the most frequently used coin in everyday transactions during the first century or two of the Roman Imperial Period. So you might say this is the coin through which the Empire communicated most directly with its population (both army and civilian), and with which they were most familiar.</p><p><br /></p><p>Some can be quite interesting, but they do tend to be heavily worn, like my Trajan AE As depicting (maybe?) the historic &quot;Bridge over the River Danube&quot;:</p><p><br /></p><p>[ATTACH=full]1563774[/ATTACH]</p><p><br /></p><p>Digging around I noticed many more Asses in my drawers than I remembered. (They were once plentiful in the glory days of &quot;unopened bags of 1,000 uncleaned coins,&quot; so I acquired many that way.) Few are very nice.</p><p><br /></p><p>I don&#039;t have any of Trajan&#039;s ITALIA coinage, but I found this AE As which is of a somewhat similar spirit, an Arabia specimen never before photographed:</p><p><br /></p><p>[ATTACH=full]1563775[/ATTACH]</p><p><br /></p><p>I like the little camel of course, but as a collector of Roman captives coinage, I&#039;m also fond of the contrast with Trajan&#039;s Dacia coinage, which showed Dacia as a conquered captive. Arabia is shown in a much gentler, more &quot;inclusive&quot; light. (See esp. Woytek&#039;s [2015] &quot;<font size="4"><a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/43859784" target="_blank" class="externalLink ProxyLink" data-proxy-href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/43859784" rel="nofollow">The Camel Drachms of Trajan in Context</a>.</font>&quot;)</p><p><br /></p><p>I also collect Roman Provincial &amp; Imperial countermarks, and the most frequently countermarked coins were probably Asses:</p><p>[MEDIA=youtube]FuknPcybm6A[/MEDIA]</p><p><br /></p><p>And, if you collect Roman Provincial coins, there are many coins that roughly approximate the AE As as a local denomination (sometimes called an Assarion, though the size of that denomination -- or label, as we don&#039;t necessary know what they were called -- varied dramatically by location and after the first century).</p><p><br /></p><p>Here&#039;s one of my favorites:</p><p><br /></p><p>Strictly speaking, it&#039;s not considered a Roman Imperial type (it&#039;s classified in <a href="https://rpc.ashmus.ox.ac.uk/coins/1/1256" target="_blank" class="externalLink ProxyLink" data-proxy-href="https://rpc.ashmus.ox.ac.uk/coins/1/1256" rel="nofollow">RPC vol I, 1256</a>) because it&#039;s struck in provincial Patras, Achaea. But <a href="https://www.acsearch.info/search.html?id=622873" target="_blank" class="externalLink ProxyLink" data-proxy-href="https://www.acsearch.info/search.html?id=622873" rel="nofollow">BCD Peloponnesos II 2782</a> (this coin) classifies it as an AE As (11.56g, 25mm, 1h), and it&#039;s often labeled as such. The legends are Latin, the style is Imperial, and it was struck for veterans who were settled at &quot;Colonia Augusta Achaica Patrensis&quot; -- those of Legio X (prob. Fretensis) and Legio XII Fulminata.</p><p><br /></p><p>[ATTACH=full]1563778[/ATTACH][/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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