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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;red_spork, post: 2525851, member: 74282&quot;]When it comes to these Janus types that&#039;s still a bit up in the air - though I&#039;m told by Andrew McCabe that a forthcoming work by Frey Kupper will have more answers. Mint mark is not necessarily the correct word for what I&#039;m talking about though, because there were marks(both of symbol types and letter types) in use both at the Rome mint and at these various fields mints. &quot;Series mark&quot; is more correct in this context, although still not perfect because there is more than one instance where the same mark was used for two different series and they must be differentiated by style alone rather than any technical description. Exactly what these were used for is not known. We know that some of the lettered varieties corresponded to names as you mentioned, and also that grain-ear(or corn-ear if you&#039;re reading most references) with or without additional symbols is used several times for types from Sicily, and the &quot;MP&quot; on one series of victoriati is traditionally thought to mean &quot;Metapontum&quot; but there&#039;s so solid evidence for this and the type is too scarce for hoard evidence to confirm this so far.</p><p><br /></p><p>This is complicated by the fact there there are coins that are obviously related to some of these &quot;marked&quot; issues by style(and occasionally even by die matches) but do not bear a mark. Maybe they were just engraver errors, or maybe something different, who knows.</p><p><br /></p><p>As an example of all this, the first two coins below were struck in Central Italy - likely Etruria - and have a &quot;staff&quot;(the line) above the prow. The next two(not my coins) were struck in Rome, to roughly the same weight standard and around the same time and also bear a staff(and for the triens, it&#039;s even on the obverse) but are in very different styles. The final coin(also not mine) seems to be related to the first based on obverse style, in particular the wide staring eyes, but bears no staff. Similar coins are known with stylistic similarities to other &quot;staff&quot; types but with no symbols. Were these an earlier or later issue cut by the same Central Italian engravers? Who knows? But they seem to be related.</p><p><br /></p><p>[ATTACH=full]539126[/ATTACH] </p><p>[ATTACH=full]539129[/ATTACH] </p><p><br /></p><p>[ATTACH=full]539131[/ATTACH] </p><p>[ATTACH=full]539132[/ATTACH] </p><p>[ATTACH=full]539169[/ATTACH][/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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