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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;rasielsuarez, post: 24680505, member: 148921&quot;]At the risk of sounding presumptuous I think that if David Sear were to have any doubts about this coin he&#039;d reach out to me for an opinion. But I can&#039;t see him taking more than a glance at it to come to the conclusion that whatever corroded core this coin once was it had nothing at all to do with the reign of Romulus Augustus.</p><p><br /></p><p>That you saw, or thought you saw, a legible string reading out part of his name and countermarks with AVG and CAESAR to boot tells me that 5th century coinage is an area you&#039;re almost certainly not very familiar with. In the who knows how many LRB I&#039;ve come across I&#039;ve yet to see (off the top of my head) a single coin showing what could be interpreted as an official countermark. Grafitti, yes, and restrikes and damage of all kinds, of course. </p><p><br /></p><p>At least in the traditional usage, a countermark however implies that at some point a distressed mint took an already circulated coin and officially &quot;refurbished&quot; it to reintroduce it into circulation because doing so would be cheaper than making a new coin from scratch. That made sense to do on big Claudian coins during certain periods. These tiny AE4s on the other hand were essentially worthless on the day they were made. Also, if you think about it for a second, you have no choice than to come to the conclusion that the stamping of code by then fully half a millenium out of date is utterly implausiblle given that RA is literally the last gasp of the Roman empire! There were no more augusti or caesars. Hell, there weren&#039;t many coins being made at all. What for? The urban economy was gone and Italy had largely reverted to a subsistence agrarian civilization.</p><p><br /></p><p>If I had to take a guess I&#039;d say this is a Theodosius II on the grounds that if you really did see a bunch of letters <i>and that </i>there was a cross on the reverse that this is the most plausible issue: <a href="http://www.tantaluscoins.com/coins/169.php" target="_blank" class="externalLink ProxyLink" data-proxy-href="http://www.tantaluscoins.com/coins/169.php" rel="nofollow">http://www.tantaluscoins.com/coins/169.php</a></p><p><br /></p><p>Rasiel[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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