My new shot: Trebonianus Gallus anto from Antiochia with 2 huge errors on reverse legend: ADVNTVS AVS (instead of ADVENTVS AVG):
ADVNTVS certainly makes the grade here but I am unwilling to accept as an error an Eastern coin with AVS. There were those of us over the last couple thousand years that believed a proper abbreviation ends with the last letter of the larger word so AVgustuS might be intentional if not the way the
home office back in
Rome might have done it.
I also know that some of you think I'm being difficult when I ask which of these coins is unlisted in the
standard references
RIC and
BMC.
RIC 362 and
BMC 338 were listed based on the coin in the
British Museum collection (Pl. 15. 9.) which is short
legend on the right
reverse. The editors assumed the coin ended in
AVG but the coin is a die duplicate of the coin below which reads AVS.
Such an error is quite understandable when dealing with
part legend coins but the coin below is an exact match for the listing ending in
AVG so it turns out that the error actually listed a coin but now the one they
had in hand.
Going back a
bit,
Cohen listed the coin with
AVG ending as number 738 quoting as source "
Wiczav" which is not known to me (anyone have or know of this?). I do not know if this pre-1880's listing was photo or line drawing illustrated and I don't know which of the two was the source of Cohen/i]Wiczav[/i] quote. I did find references to plates in a listing of a
work by that name on Hellenistic coins so the possibility exists that the question is answered on one of those compilations of out of print coin books CD's which I don't own.
A lot of new things have cropped up in the centuries since some of our numismatic works were fresh. Whether some of them are errors or just different is not always clear to me. What are we to assume when an old, unillustrated listing is found but we have no coin that matches it. Was the coin lost or was the listing in error? I
hope future editions of comprehensive books will continue to list things no longer confirmable but it would be nice if they were so marked rather than just quoted with authority.