April-September AD 239 (3rd & 4th Issues, 1st Officina

[Run]

Can someone explain to me how this tidbit of information can be gained from a coin.

Gordian III Ant “Equity / On this coin I se no indication of how to tell this what issue or officina it is.

Thanks in advance

WIll

[curtislclay]

The sequence of obv. legends and rev. types under G. III is clear, but how you divide this sequence into issues is up to the individual scholar.

I myself usually divide by changes of rev. type.  As long as the same rev. types continue, that's the same issue in my book, even if the obv. legend changes and the date on the rev. changes say from TR P II to III.

Others might divide my one issue into three or four, making a new issue when the obv. legend changed and another when the date advanced.

Your Aequitas coin is from the first part of the second issue on my scheme.  The attribution you have, 3rd and 4th issue, may be from Jerome Mairat.

You see why it is essential, when you attribute a coin to an issue, to also name the AUTHOR of the scheme you are following!  The division into issues, as you correctly say, is not written on the coins, it's merely a modern construction!

However you number your issues, if you've done it right, you've established the chronological sequence of the coinage of that particular reign.  Say there are 15 clear chronological stages in a coinage; everyone will agree what the sequence of those 15 stages was; so it's not terribly important that one scholar may call that 15 issues, while another calls it six issues, a number of which however are divided into several parts.

Attribution to particular workshops, however, is a different matter: it is TOTALLY ARBITRARY, as long as the officina numbers are not written on the coins!  It's only an assumption, not a certainty, that each rev. type was produced in a different officina; but granting that, which officina produced which type, unless the numbers are written on the coins, is totally unknown!

I can imagine why your Aequitas type was attributed to officina 1: because it's alphabetically the first type, and because the author of your scheme thought it would be nice if the mint attributed types to officinae in alphabetical order.  When officinae numbers begin to appear on coins from Philip I on, however, we see that alphabetical order was of course NOT followed!

Assigning officina numbers to unnumbered types, in other words, is inane and misleading: it pretends we known something that we do NOT know and never can know! 

[Run]

Curtis I thought I had read someplace that you stated officina numbers when not directly on the coin were misleading at best.

I did not understand how the issue was fixed on a given coin. It seems like most things in this hobby everyone has a different take on how this is done. As usual thank you for enlightening  me on one more tiny facet of this hobby.

Will

[Robert_Brenchley]

Can anything be done on the basis of die matches? If, say, die A was found with PAX and FORTVNA reverses only, and die B with SALVS and VIRTVS, and both oberverse dies had the same portrait and inscription, then you could assign the types to different officinae with at least a little confidence. Or isn't it that simple?

[Steve Minnoch]

The point is that even if you could establish the number of officinae working (and assumptions are involved so it would be near impossible to prove), you would have absolutely no way of knowing which coins were in fact produced in the workshop called #1, #2.    Any modern numbering is conjecture or is an arbitrary label.

Steve

[curtislclay]

The joker in the officina-assignment game: the coins with perfect obverses, but on the reverse two contemporaneous types struck one on top of the other.

Colin Kraay's explanation of this phenomemon, made verbally to me some forty years ago, must surely be correct:  the two overstruck rev. dies were being applied alternately and at rapid speed to the same obverse die, the overstrikes occurring when the completed coin was not removed from the obv. die in time, so bang! was hit by the second rev. die before that worker could heed a possible warning or even think of stopping!

Those two rev. types, in other words, far from being struck in two separate workshops, were being struck alterately at one and the same obv. die!