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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;dougsmit, post: 4582091, member: 19463&quot;]Those of you who only collect one small part of ancient coins have the option of following a book order (in this case, Crawford) but we collectors of everything have no single book that lists even half of our civilizations so we have to make up something.&nbsp; Once, years ago, I keyed on a different book for each major group primarily using Sear for Roman, Greek and &#039;Greek Imperials&#039;&nbsp; but I could not tolerate the way he split Parthians, for example, so I divided the history of coinage &#039;my way&#039; dividing Greek into ten pieces G0 (Western) through G9 (Hellenistic) and reserving all P0 through PZ for Provincials and R0 (Aes Grave)&nbsp; through RZ (Byzantine).&nbsp; I did keep things simpler by making the Px series cover the same periods as the Rx series even though that meant some groups were empty sets (RV worked out to be Constantine I but there are no Provincials that late so there are no PV coded coins).&nbsp; If I had it to do over, I would split up Hellenistic using letters above 9.&nbsp; Ancient coins not Greek or Roman used OA through OZ but everything medieval and modern went in the Zx sets.&nbsp; The idea here is you could customize it as you wanted so a simple sort would organize the coins as you wish.&nbsp; The numbers 0000 through 9999 were available within each group for use as seemed best.&nbsp; In the beginning, I just took all my coins of, for example, the 12 Caesars and spread them in date order across RB0000 to RB9999 as seemed appropriate at the time.&nbsp; The only important thing was that all the Nero coins got higher numbers than the Claudius and lower numbers than the Otho so any standard sorting algorithm would place the coins in the desired order reserving enough spaces for the unlikely possibility that I would start specializing in Otho.&nbsp; I had to renumber a few groups because I bought too many coins, for example, FEL TEMP REPARATIO, and had not left enough spaces for yet another coin from the Rome mint.&nbsp; It really has not been all that many times and groups but it is hard to guess where a collection of 300 coins will go when it becomes a collection of 3000.</p><p><br /></p><p>No one needs to understand a system but the person who uses it.&nbsp; If I were to have your collection, I would follow the Crawford number with something like a Banti number to keep all the same coins with different die numbers or minor devices ordered as I wanted them.&nbsp; That would, of course require doing something else for all those periods not in Banti. My numbers do not record date of purchase etc. but my database records that in separate fields.</p><p><br /></p><p>I wish I were smart and organized enough to figure out one system that would make sense to everyone and organize the history of coinage from protos to proofs but I fall back on the fact that my way works for me and that is all that matters.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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