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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;Gao, post: 774336, member: 19409&quot;]Sure.&nbsp; Stuff like this is actually pretty easy once you get used to ancients.</p><p>&nbsp;I probably don&#039;t need to tell you this, but that&#039;s the emperor&#039;s name and the years of his reign, during which this coin was struck.</p><p>&nbsp;This is referring to the metal the coin is made from.&nbsp; AE is the chemical symbol for copper, and it&#039;s used to identify copper, brass, and bronze coins.&nbsp; AR is used for coins that are mostly silver, and AV or AU is used for gold.&nbsp; Coins of debased gold are electrum, and debased silver are billion, and usually those terms are not abbreviated if they are used.&nbsp; This coin might actually have a very small amount of silver in it, which would make it billion.</p><p>&nbsp;This is the denomination.&nbsp; It was worth 2 denarii, and at one point, it was mostly silver, though by this period, they had been debased so much that there wasn&#039;t much there, perhaps only in the wash applied to the coin to give it a silver appearance.</p><p>&nbsp;This is what&#039;s on the obverse.&nbsp; It&#039;s the head of the emperor right wearing a radiate crown (this crown was basically a denomination mark by this point meaning that the coin was double the value of another).</p><p>&nbsp;This is what&#039;s on the reverse.&nbsp; It&#039;s Annona, the personification of the grain dole, which was a public distribution of free grain given to the citizens of Rome.&nbsp; By putting this on the coin, the emperor is reminding the people of his generosity and his role in this event.</p><p>&nbsp;This means that it still has some of the silver wash that was applied to show that the coin theoretically has some amount of silver in it.&nbsp; Silvering usually isn&#039;t present in high amounts on most coins that have survived.</p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p>I would say something like:</p><p><br /></p><p>Galienus (AD 253-268)</p><p>Silvered Antoninianus</p><p><br /></p><p>Obverse: &quot;GALIENVS AVG,&quot; radiate bust of emperor right</p><p><br /></p><p>Reverse: Annona standing left</p><p><br /></p><p>If you&#039;re going to show it to people who aren&#039;t into ancients, you might want to include some of the information I wrote earlier.&nbsp; You also might want to see if you can find a specific reference for this coin, which I might be able to help you with later.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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