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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;kevin McGonigal, post: 4488020, member: 72790&quot;]I am not as well versed in Byzantine coinage as I ought to be but let me ask a question about the use of the M for the value of 40 numus coin. I know. of course that the Greeks used letters of their alphabet to indicate numerical values such as epsilon for a five numus coin, iota for a ten and kappa for a twenty. I also know that even though Justinian spoke Latin as his first language (maybe, it might have been a Danubian dialect used at home) the complete language of these coins, those big folles, is Latin. So why the Latin for the inscription but the Greek numbering value for these coins? I have seen large 40 numus coins, I think of Maurice Tiberius or Justin II with four XXXX so a four X coin was a possibility. Certainly when the Byzantines went to all Greek in their inscriptions the use of the Greek alphabet made sense, but why its use on a totally Latin inscribed coin earlier?[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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