A few comments.
First on the ear: I suspect that the two "blobs" you are seeing - in the ear and just above and behind the earlobe - are actually corrosion products. It is not unusual on this kind of smooth, shiny, dark green
patina to have small flat "lumps" that have the same patina/finish but are actually corrosion products, or more property adhesions products of leached copper. They often "
pop" off when manipulated with a scalpel. If I am correct then the ear would actually look quite normal beneath. Personally though I would not risk the cleaning, it is
fine as is.
Second: RIC-VIII is grossly out of date when it
comes to dating the VICTORIA DD AVGG Q NN
type. It starts in 341/342 not 347, there was no six year gap as postulated in
RIC. I cover this in depth in "A Handbook of Late
Roman Bronze Coin
Types 324-395", but the short version of the story is that
Kent mis-dated the coinage to 347-348 in RIC-VIII, likely based on an over-reliance on data from UK
hoards.
Depeyrot used evidence from continental
hoards to show that production remained steady - if slow - 341-348 with the Victoria
type struck right through.
Kent agreed to this interpretation at the 1991 Congres internationale de
numismatique, but by then the damage
had been done. RIC-VIII has not been updated since and many other numismatists, as well as authors, dealers and collectors continue to follow
RIC, not realizing the date was accepted as wrong 30 years ago. Interestingly, in
LRBC, which was published before RIC-VIII,
Hill had the correct start date. He dated the coinage 341-346.
His end date was wrong as
LRBC had 346 instead of the proper 348 for the start of the following
FEL TEMP REPARATIO coinage.
Third: That means that the G mark at
Arelate was used in the last
GLORIA EXERCITVS issue struck late 340 to mid-341 and on the first
VICTORIAE DD AVGG Q NN issue struck late 341 to early 342. Thus immediate continuity.
Fourth: We known what these marks were for - the fulfilled some sort of accounting and control function by signifying issues, also referred to as emissions by many authors. Sometimes these marks were annual, or bi-annual, or trimestrial, etc. Other times the period of use varied. What we sadly don't know is what these marks meant - in other words did they stand for anything or were they just
symbols. At most mints at most times only
symbols were used (e.g.
,
,
etc), but at times letters were used or even "
monograms" (several letters connected in
ligature e.g.
). People have wondered if these indicate the names of
mint masters, masters of the treasury or other regional officials, or perhaps spelled out
coded phrases, but no one is certain.
SC