need coin search terms in catalogs, please

[cliff_marsland]

I have some difficulty searching for certain coins in coin search engines.

The rare times that I'm searching for AE1/2/3, etc., what are the best search terms for those?  A lot of the time spacing, etc. makes a difference.

I figured out the search term for Thracian Imperials - "Varb*"

A lot of Roman provincials are really hard to search if the denomination isn't known.  Any suggestions for search terms for the Asia minor and Antioch AE issues?

What about Roman Imperial Tetradrachms from different cities in Syria?

Any help would be much appreciated.  This might help others, as well.

[Pekka K]

Try here first: https://www.forumancientcoins.com/catalog/roman-and-greek-coins.asp?srch=1

You can write 2 or 3 letters, and you have list of suggested words to select.
Change status to "ALL" and there is better possibility to hit.

Pekka K

[areich]

It is better to use loose terms and work through lists. Many coins will not have a Varbanov number. I just use "(AE bronze)" on acsearch, which means either "AE" or "Bronze" needs to be in the description and then I generally use "-sester* -dupond* -denar* -denier* -stater* -nomos*" etc., etc. But be aware that that excludes any entry that has any of these words, even in the notes.

Few people use the AEx designations and for Late Roman Bronzes there are so many, often completely made up, denominations that I would not use them at all, unless I was searching for a common coin and didn't mind that many entries will not contain the word "follis", e.g.


For Provincials from Antioch, I would use "antioch* (ae bronze provin*) -follis" and, depending on the results, exclude some more common but unwanted results.

some candidates:
-KAISERZEIT
-SELEUK*
-seleuc*

Few coins will have the word "provincial Provinz" etc. in the description so I would use the term but not exclusively. Of course you can also specify which Antioch you want. You may lose some entries, so if it is a rare coin, I would again, not exclude too many and prefer to scroll through hundreds or thousands of coins rather than miss my coin.


I assumed that you don't mean actual sales catalogues?

[Molinari]

I have the most success describing the iconography of the coin as concisely as possible, and including the general area, if known (e.g. Thrace, Griffin, Dionysus, AR). For particularly small or large coins I sometimes add the dimensions, e.g., 10mm, etc.

However, that's the method I use for Greek coins, so it might not be as helpful with Roman coinage.

[Andrew McCabe]

Coin search terms can be counter intuitive, and require a great deal of experimentation to weed out useless results. No simple answers. For example, when looking for Roman Republican coins, 'denarius' can often produce better results than 'Roman Republic' because it avoids idiotic sellers who list a hundred consecutive late roman bronzes as Roman Republic, and mozt listed denarii are, surprisingly, Republican. When searching for Julius Caesar, 'Julius' produces far better results than 'Caesar', for obvious reasons, but don't forget foreign spellings. When looking for Republican bronzes, 'Janus' produces many times better results than 'as', but for lower denominations it's best just to use the denomination name. Excluding 'augustus' from the search term is a good way of avoiding a flood of late roman bronzes. And so on. None of this is any direct help to the original query except to advise that experimentation is needed.

[cliff_marsland]

Thanks for the suggestions.  It's not so bad here in-house searching for AE 3, AE4, etc. the rare times I look for those, because they're categorized very well, but it's a real pain elsewhere.

For instance, things can be categorized as AE1, AE 1, etc.  It's a pain.  With AE4, it can be AE 4, AE4, nummus, yada yada.

Most of those times I'm looking for a restored follis of Julian II or the AE 1 or his immediate successors.  It's not really often, but I do get the yen for them once in a while.

I've had a lot of  problems looking for some provincials in the past, especially if I was just looking for a certain size.  I didn't have so much trouble with the Thracian Imperials, but if I went looking for Sestertius sized provincials of Asia Minor, I had a lot of difficulty.  Even with Forum's very excellent sub-categorization, sometimes those can be toughies.

[SC]

Unless you are looking for random LRBCs, in which case it should be easy with terms like "late Roman", I would try using either the reverse legends or the emperors.

So for example those AE1s would come up under securitas reipvb and/or julian.  Yes, that means you miss any that are poorly labelled but then they are unlikely to be listed with anything else searchable anyway...

Shawn

[Callimachus]

I am trying to search for the aes (or as) as a coin denomination -- the coin that along with the sestertius and dupondius made up three AE denominations of the 1st, 2nd, and part of the 3rd centuries. 

Searching the Forum member galleries I got 9698 hits.  Upon closer examination the computer found "aes" in the word caesar.  No wonder there were so many hits.  Since when do computer searches return hits if the string of letters in included somewhere inside another word? 

I wish those who write software would take a hint from Google: To get exact words, phrases, or other strings of letters, put them in quotation marks.  In the Forum member galleries, as search of "aes" in quotation marks, brought zero hits.  Either all or nothing.