Leseul wrote, "I would like to know what was the evidence used to assign a
type to an
officina."
A
very good question! My answer is, unless the
officina numbers are recorded on the coins themselves, we have no evidence whatsoever. So it is fatuous and pointless to try to assign
officina numbers to the various
types of
Gordian III. The numbers are not on the coins, and we have no evidence for determining what they might have been!
Obverse dies were generally not confined to particular
officinae. It is quite normal to find the same
obverse dies used to strike several different contemporaneous
reverse types, or reverses marked by several
officinae. To explain this phenomenon, those who assume that
officinae were separate sections of the
mint that struck exclusively their own
reverse type or coins with their own
officina numbers, hypothesize that the dies may have been collected each night for safekeeping and then redistributed in the morning. Each
officina would receive its own
reverse dies, but the
obverse dies were unmarked and could be used by any
officina, so could be used with different
reverse types or different
officina numbers over the course of their lives.
But the assumption that different
reverse types were regularly struck in separate workshops within the
mint is ERRONEOUS! This is proved by the not inconsiderable number of
Roman silver coins and especially Roman bronze coins, that have normal obverses but on the
reverse two contemporaneous
types struck one on top of the other. Leseul showed us one such
sestertius of
Gordian III about two weeks ago. This must mean, as
Colin Kraay was the first to realize, that those two
reverse dies with different
types were being struck alternately and rapidly AT ONE AND THE SAME
OBVERSE DIE! Far from the two
types being struck individually in separate sections of the
mint, they were being struck first one, then the other in rapid alternation at a single
obverse die!
So what did
officina numbers mean, and how was the production of the different
types and
denominations arranged at the
mint? I don't know, but I also do not consider it an important question! We study coins to understand what contribution they can make to our knowledge of
history. For that goal we need to discover what
types were produced together, in what relative volume and at what time, and we need to compare the historical information conveyed by the coin
types and legends with the record provided by the written sources and the inscriptions. Exactly how the
mint produced the coins is, in the first place, of only minor interest and importance, and, in the second place, may well be unknowable!
I think, incidentally, that the Baldwin TR P VI
sestertius was struck from a different
obverse die than the two other coins you show above.
