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Message:: [QUOTE="Gao, post: 651995, member: 19409"]Don't clean this further! It's already overcleaned, and you're not going to help it at all by more cleaning. Besides, there's probably nothing there that would help with identifying it.  That makes sense. It was a coin minted for local circulation in Egypt. It's possible, though we'd need to be able to tell more about it for this before we could reach that conclusion. Our issue here is that the coin doesn't seem to be intact enough to identify easily. Busts over the third century became more and more alike, making it hard to tell emperors apart, and yours is worn enough where it seems that Arditirion and I can't even agree if it has a beard! We generally use the text on the front for identification, but I can't make any of that out enough to help us at the moment. To prove that it's an unknown type, we would need this text, as there isn't anything else about this coin that is particularly unusual. Basically, our issue is not that we can't find any coin that seems to match what you have, it's that we can find so many that we can't really narrow it down. I would place my bets on this being a rather common coin of one of the tetrarchs (Diocletian, Maximian, Constantius I, or Galerius), or perhaps of one of the emperors from just before that like Aurelian or Probus.[/QUOTE]