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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;Valentinian, post: 2933440, member: 44316&quot;]There has been a lot of scholarship devoted to the sizes of Greek issues, which are often well-documented issues that are small compared to Roman issues. By being valuable, Greek silver coins have been worth photographing in sale catalogs that are in major numismatic libraries. Those images, plus internet images, allow scholars to identify and count dies used for the issue. DeCallatay wrote two books assembling the data from numerous publications (sometimes Ph.D. theses) and they cover over 600 Greek issues including most of the famous ones. Using statistical techniques we can estimate how many dies were used in the issue. For example, one study found 683 examples of this well known large Macedonian type:[ATTACH=full]712811[/ATTACH] Sear 1386.</p><p>from 149 different obverse dies, which yields an estimated 190 dies originally (which is not very precise). If we accept 20,000 coins per die (a guess, but somewhat justified by evidence) that would make about 3,800,000 coins in that issue.</p><p><br /></p><p>Roman coins have not been studied as much because their numbers are so much greater that distinguishing their dies (more than hundreds of dies for a single design) in a study is almost impossible, as is gathering a good representative sample. You could do it with Otho (expensive enough to be photographed and rare enough to make a manageable sample). But it would be a huge amount of work to do it with FTR types.</p><p><br /></p><p>I imagine there are hundreds of &quot;soldier-spearing-fallen-horseman&quot; for every Greek silver of the above type. That suggests there were originally hundreds of millions made. Add in other issues of the time period and I wouldn&#039;t be surprised if there were originally a billion coins of Constantius II.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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