SO I see the RIC will list coins as R1 to R5, most of these volumes are many years old and many hordes have been discovered since then. How often does that affect the rarity index and is there is evolving guide to roman rarities? Chris
RIC never intended to be a record of all coins. The authors surveyed a specific group of large, mostly public collections and recorded how many had a coin. When they say a coin is R5, they found it in only one of the 50 or so places they looked. If it was a C, they found it in most of the collections. Not every volume used the same parameters. That is one thing you must accept about RIC. Every author did his volume HIS way and made no effort to be consistent with the way others did theirs. I doubt the authors ever dreamed non-professional collectors would abuse their rarity ratings the way they have. I was once shown five coins in one hand that were all the same R5. That probably means that they came from a hoard that was not distributed among big museums. This can work the other way, too. Imagine there is a hoard that contains 50 examples of a coin previously not recorded and it was studied by the British Museum a hundred years ago. Many smaller museums in their circle would ask for a coin since they did not have it. As a result, there were only 50 of the coins in existence but all went to the collections that were later surveyed for RIC ratings so the coin would show as Common. Collectors would wonder why they never could find this common coin. As I understand the matter, there are several types known solely from one find. Again, imagine someone found a mint sack of 5000 identical denarii lost on its way to pay some troops. If the bag was found in 1700 and entered the coin market, we may now see it as common but another bag with another type was never lost long ago so the coins were distributed and many used up by time. Modern collectors have statistics on how many coins were made but that figure is never known for ancients. If they made a million and a million rotted in the ground, the mintage may as well been zero. If they made 5000 for a special purpose but all survived by some stroke of luck, the coin is common but all may be sitting in some museum basement so it may as well be super rare. There are too many factors that play for us to understand the matter. This happened in a smaller way to US collectors a few decades back when they released some bags of old dollars that had been on the bottom of the stack in some vault. One (was it 1904O?) went overnight from very rare to very common and every coin was uncirculated. What is found and what is done with finds make all the difference in ancient 'rarities'. How many were made is not significant.
I think Rasiel Suarez's rarity tables give a reasonably accurate appraisal of rarity by ruler and AE/AR/AU: http://www.forumancientcoins.com/numiswiki/view.asp?key=ERIC+-+Rarity+Tables
I see often in RIC Vol. IV a rarity listing for a single coin variety appears as: R3,S or R2, S. Does anyone know what this dual rating means? Thanks.
Following are some side notes: The information here is mostly based on THE LONDON MINT OF CONSTANTIUS AND CONSTANTINE (CT = Cloke/Toone) - a relatively new book which includes considerable additional and revised coinage material, including a new catalog numbering and rarity assessment system. RIC uses follis/folles as the nomenclature for this coinage while CT uses nummus/nummi. I use RIC catalog numbers for all coin depictions (if applicable) on my web pages and include equivalent CT catalog numbers where appropriate. CT uses a rarity assessment scale for London Mint coinage which appears to be realistic and up-to-date being based on four significant Census Hoard finds that comprise over 3,000 London Mint coins as follows: C - Common: 25 to 150 examples (over 150 - very common CC) S - Scarce: 5 to 24 examples R - Rare: 0 to 4 examples (0 - very rare RR) For me the Jury is still out until I have a chance to survey the system more. The book: https://www.amazon.co.uk/London-Mint-Constantius-Constantine/dp/1907427511
It won't be the same variety - check on the leftmost column. Even aurei and denarii can share the same RIC number. I'm away from my books so I can't give an example, but typically in the cases you mention it will mean that the aureus is rated R2 and the denarius S. Offhand, I think sestertii and asses sometimes share numbers too - it should be clear from the first column that more than one coin is in question. ATB, Aidan.
Thanks very much. I will take a closer look and see if I can tell it is multiple coins getting a single RIC number.
