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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;dougsmit, post: 988357, member: 19463&quot;]Going back in time, the practice of marking the state name on coins was rarely a high prority when it could be assumed.&nbsp; Rather few Roman Imperial coins actually say &#039;ROMA&#039; on them but many earlier Republican ones do before Rome was the major power it later became.&nbsp; The bigger the state became, the less they felt the need to name it on the coins.&nbsp; The emperor is shown with his titles but he is not limited by it being pointed out that he is just ruler of the Romans; he is presented simply as &#039;Augustus&#039; and a string of other titles.&nbsp; When Rome is mentioned on a coin it is generally in connection with the type like &#039;Glory of the Romans&#039; showing a soldier or when the city personification herself is shown matching the coins where Britannia appears on the coins.&nbsp; Alexander the Great and the Hellenistic kings that followed him ususally had legends with only their names but you don&#039;t see things like &#039;Ptolemy, king of Egypt&#039; which would admit that he was not king of somewhere else.&nbsp; Conversely, the big user of the city name was Athens that almost always marked their coins with the first three letters of the twon name even though the distinctive owl type would have identified it quite nicely.&nbsp; Relying on distinctive city badges for types was common so the need to actually spell out the name of the state was not consistant.&nbsp; Kings are more likely to point out that they are in charge than to limit their power by being too specific about what is included in their rule.&nbsp; The exceptions to this is when they felt the need to claim being over France, Spain or India in addition to the obvious homeland.</p><p>&nbsp;</p><p>I believe we were expected to realize that the money was not &#039;of the country&#039; but &#039;of the king&#039; so it was not necessary to state that a coin with Victoria&#039;s portrait and inscription was from her country.&nbsp; Provincials in Roman times usually had the emperor&#039;s portrait on the obverse with a reverse legend reading in the genitive plural &#039;of the Marcianapolitans&#039;, for example which is what we see when Canada and Australia mark their coins but the UK does not.&nbsp;&nbsp; All this is the development of centuries of tradition which we might call &#039;the language of coins&#039;.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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