Can you help me with this Roman Provincial coin? I think it's from Ninica-Claudiopolis, but Wildwinds as well as RPC, ACSearch and the admirable @Ed Snible website Historia Numorum mention only later emperors for this Cilician town, starting from Trajan. Where is this in the numismatic literature? AE25 Vespasian, Ninica-Claudiopolis. Obv. Laureate head right. ...KAICAP OYECΠACIANOC AYT…Π… Rev. Victory to the left, delivering a wreath. TH NEIKHKLAYDION… 25 mm, 12.26 gr.
Here it is: https://rpc.ashmus.ox.ac.uk/coins/2/1612 The city is listed there as Laodicea Catacecaumene but was also called Claudiolaodicea.
A couple of little tricks I use for ACSearch (I always try a few different ways to search like this, since cataloging conventions are inconsistent -- and languages)... One of my favorites is partial legend search (wildwinds use to have this, and I used it ALL the time, but that tool went down a few years back, I believe). You & @zumbly are right that these won't show up as Ninica-Claudiopolis, but you can find it searching fragments of legends (i.e., without know it was a Laodicea-C). Since you already had the reverse legend spelled out, I tried it with several permutations of NEIKH, all of which gave me good results of your type: NEIKH (just that, nothing else); adding AE reduces results from 52 to 17. Also combining AE with *EIKH or *EIK* works, though sometimes with many results. It took a little messing around to figure out the principle, but it seems you only need the *-wildcard at the end if you also used it at the start. (Otherwise it only returns legends ending or breaking there, which actually would've still worked in your case), but you do at the beginning if that fragment may be in the middle (e.g., EIK* or EIKH* do not work.) I would've probably also searched for Victory too, but surprisingly, given how common the devices are, if you'd searched for Nike instead (since it's Provincial/Greek), with Vespasian, Wreath, AE you would've seen several examples pop up (8 of about 19 results: https://www.acsearch.info/search.html?term=Vespasian+nike+wreath+ae). https://www.acsearch.info/search.html?term=ae+NEIKH You might have already know all that -- but ... just in case, and for anyone else looking!
Many thanks for the public-service advice, @Curtis! Just bookmarked this thread, just for that. @Pellinore, that's one of the coolest provincials I've ever seen. It's brilliant how the legends do that iconically Flavian retrograde thing, but in Greek. ...Even a reasonably good rendering of the portrait!
Thank you, @Curtis and @zumbly very much! Now I did make a mistake in putting this coin into the air as a Ninica AE. I had based this upon an earlier reading of the legend as NHNEIKHKLAYDION, but looking better, I had seen that it is TH instead of NH. And as Zumbly spotted, it's not ...KLAYDION but ...KLAYDIOL, with Labda at the end. Claudiolaodicea. I see elsewhere on CoinTalk that is the same as Laodicea Combusta, so it is also in our List of Roman Provincial Coin Cities and the accompanying thread. By the way, in the same auction where I bought it was another example of the same type, here it is. And thanks for the 'little tricks' for searching ACSearch and other sites. That is very useful, broadening your panorama. Different from Ninica, this town is only 15 miles east of Sinope, a town I collect. That's nice!
