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Message:: [QUOTE="DonnaML, post: 4233170, member: 110350"]I looked into your question a little, and have some answers, although they're not entirely conclusive.  According to Crawford's preface, he reviewed every single type he lists in his catalogue.  But he doesn't say he personally reviewed an example of every single control-mark he lists, or every single die.  On the other hand, how could he have known to state that there are 240 different obverse dies of the Roscius Fabatus denarius and 241 different reverse dies (see Crawford 412/1, Vol. I at p. 439), or have listed 241 different pairs of control-marks for that denarius (Vol. II at pp. 790-794), without personally reviewing examples of all of them, or at least photos of all of them?  Perhaps by basing his list of pairs of control-marks on earlier lists compiled by Grueber (author of the 3-volume work  Coins of the Roman Republic in the British Museum from 1914), and by Babelon in his 1885 catalogue?  (The numbers on Crawford's list are keyed to those on Grueber's and Babelon's lists.)  But his list is not exactly the same as the earlier ones, and he  states that his list and illustrative plates of Roscius Fabatus control-marks "illustrate all combinations of control-marks known to me; I do not think that the list is as complete as for L. Papius" (id. at p. 790) -- which certainly suggests personal review. Furthermore, Crawford also states in his preface that the two plates of drawings of the Roscius Fabatus control-marks (as well as the two plates of drawings of the marks on the L. Papius denarius) were new, and at page xv he thanks Erica Mattingly for those drawings.  (She was the wife of the numismatist Harold B. Mattingly, the son of the Harold Mattingly who wrote or co-wrote all the volumes of RIC published before his death in 1964.)  Indeed, the key to the control-mark drawings in Plate LXVIII expressly states that the drawing of pair no. 106 -- the pair I identified as being the closest to the one on my example of the coin -- was "misdrawn" in Grueber.  Which also strongly implies a personal review of an example of a coin with that pair of control-marks.  Yet, he still has "?/?" for pair no. 106 in his list identifying the objects represented by all the different pairs (see id. at p. 792 ).  So I have to conclude that if he did review such an example (in person or by review of a photograph), he either didn't use sufficient magnification to show the small flame within each of the two objects (which seems unlikely), or the example was too worn to show them. Obviously, Crawford could not have personally reviewed as many as a few hundred different die examples for each of the 500+ Republican coins included in his catalogue, or personally calculated the number of dies used for each.  See his essay in Volume II beginning at p. 640, entitled "Size of Issues of Coinage," stating at p. 641 that "to count all the dies used to strike during the Republic would be the work of several lifetimes."  But he must have done so (or at least have reviewed published photographs) for certain types for which he lists all the control marks, including the Roscius Fabatus type. For the rest (see, e.g., Table L at pp. 642-671 of Vol. II), he estimates the number of obverse dies for every denarius issued from 157-31 BC -- even the ones for which moneyers did not use a numbered or lettered sequence of dies -- based on a representative sample of "24 hoards selected because of their size and because the pattern of issues in them has not been distorted by selection in modern times (as far as is known)." See id. at p. 641 and the Notes to Table L at p. 672, explaining how the numbers were estimated.[/QUOTE]

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