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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;seth77, post: 3358102, member: 56653&quot;]Reviving this old and very interesting OP.</p><p><br /></p><p>Apart from the coins that became available after the fall of the Iron Curtain and the dissolution of the USSR, another wave of Crimean coins became available to western collectors and numismatists with the Ukrainian collectors who left Crimea around the Russian invasion and annexation of March 2014.</p><p><br /></p><p>These coins add to what we already knew about the coinage of Theodosius II and Valentinian III, of which one of the most interesting features in my opinion is how brittle and prone to breaking the flans of these coins are. I don&#039;t think I have ever seen an instance where the flan of the coin is not seriously cracked or missing pieces.</p><p><br /></p><p>The 5th century is not remembered by historians and numismatists for its extraordinary quality control of the minting output, but this coinage seems to constantly and coherently suffer from low quality flans and blundered legends. Might this settle the controversy about its minting place and settle the type as a local coinage (remember these are not found throughout the Eastern Empire, but rather around and radiating from Crimea)?</p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p>[ATTACH=full]889570[/ATTACH]</p><p>Valentinian III, 22x19mm 4.90g,&nbsp; DN VA retrograde L ENTIN - IANVS PE AVG(?) / CONCOR - [DIA AGV], notice the rather big flan crack on the reverse and off-flan exergue.</p><p>cf. RIC X Constantinople 461, Valentinian is rather underrepresented in this coinage.</p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p>[ATTACH=full]889574[/ATTACH]</p><p>Theodosius II 21x18mm 4.19g, DN [THEODO] - SIVS PF AVG / [CONCOR] - DIA AG[V] / CONS in exergue, notice the broken flan and the cracks both on the obverse and the reverse.</p><p>cf. RIC X Constantinople 460.</p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p>The obverse effigy of the emperor is very similar to the earlier late 4th century bust types in military attire, which makes this Cherson coinage an imitative issue, apart from the regular coinage of the time (which was in most cases reduced to the small nummi, the occasional siliquae and the solidus).</p><p><br /></p><p>In RIC, Kent dates it tentatively to 437, Grierson in &quot;Catalogue of late Roman coins in the Dumbarton Oaks Collection and in the Whittemore Collection: from Arcadius and Honorius to the accession of Anastasius, Dumbarton Oaks, 1992&quot; dates it, also tentatively, in 426. Without hoard studies and knowledge about the circulation of the type along other coins of the 5th century, these dates are rather hard to either confirm or disprove.</p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p>These two coins are from the collection of an Ukrainian collector and amateur local historian and antiquarian, ex-resident of Crimea.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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