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Message:: [QUOTE="kaparthy, post: 711352, member: 57463"]The final answer is: "It depends." Interesting thread.  I cut and pasted comments from Christian, MissSasha and Hontonai for my own knowledge base.  Just to add some points: Ancient Greek coins were generally not dated.  However, a famous case is the "New Owls" of Athens had the names of the annual officials and then on the vase (amphora), a letter to represent the month.  In Republican Rome, the moneyer was a one-year job, and young men on the rise were appointed three at a time.  Typically, one got to pick the designs.  So we know from records what the chronology was, but this is not "dating" in the usual sense. Roman and other ancients are dated by the year of the Ruler.  Alexandria, Egypt, head of Ptolemy II, letter Beta, year 2.  Later Alexandrian coins under the Romans continued this.  In Rome itself, the coin was not dated, but the emperor was.  If the coin was struck in his third consulate, then it said COS III, and meant the fifth or sixth year of rule.  (Consul was a two-year job.)  The town of Antioch was so thrilled with Julius Caesar that they used his appearance as the mark of an era and the "Caesarian" year appears on coins into the Christian era. ...Which bring up a salient point... UNIVERSAL dating was invented about 380 by Saint Jerome who calculated the Year of Our Lord, Anno Domini, since the Birth of Christ.  So, there could be no dates on coins (in our meaning) until the concept of absolute time was invented. The date on the "coin" (what we see) is often the date on the DIE (what the Mint cares about). Thus the US Mint Director reported the numbers of coins struck for the fiscal year, regardless of what (calendar) years appeared on the dies and coins.  Walter Breen invested a lot of effort in sorting that out to give us the figures we accept today for the Red Book, etc.,[/QUOTE]

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