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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;GDJMSP, post: 7468946, member: 112&quot;]I believe that would be a Samian silver tetradrachm struck in Zankle and dated 494 BC. However, it needs to be understood that the date is written and symbolized by the letter A. That&#039;s it, there are no actual numbers on the coin - just the the letter A which symbolizes that year. Now unless you knew that that letter A stands for the number 1 in that civilization at that particular time, and that year 1 translates as 494 BC in our civilization today - you would never know the coin even had a date on it.</p><p><br /></p><p>Now if one of the ancient guys wants so speak up, he can correct me if he knows of a different answer.</p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p>And that may well be true - depending upon how one wishes to define &quot;dated&quot;, as I explained in my post #10. What I&#039;m trying to tell you is, there would be no actual date on the coin. But the coin could easily be dated to that time period of 4000 years ago by it design diagnostics. You couldn&#039;t pin down an actual single year, but you could pin down a date range - 2000 BC to 1998 BC for example. That would make the coin 4000 years old.</p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p>The vast majority of the time they didn&#039;t put dates on them. The date range of a coin was identified by it&#039;s design. </p><p><br /></p><p>Take this coin for example.</p><p><br /></p><p>[ATTACH=full]1293501[/ATTACH] [ATTACH=full]1293502[/ATTACH] </p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p>I can tell you with certainty that this coin was minted in 1364, in the Netherlands, but there is not a single number, or a letter, or any design that signifies a number, anywhere on the coin. I can identify the date of that coin by its design itself.</p><p><br /></p><p>Now I believe there were some few examples of coins with either Roman numerals and or Greek numerals on them that was a date that was older than the 1234 Denmark coin that&#039;s been described already. But I cannot recall exactly which coins they are of the top of my head as that field of numismatics is not my forte.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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