Dear Jan P and Board,
Good grief! You are making my text
blush, but in truth, I often feel I am only a little better than a numismatic nobody.
You raised some
good questions regarding
RPC Online, so here are my answers to them.
RPC Online is the web version of the printed volumes of
Roman Provincial Coinage (there will be ten volumes in all, some divided into parts). This website also serves as a digital database for adding
new coins for the books that have and have not yet been published. To successfully tackle this immense project, a lot of editors were needed, each assigned to a particular volume or section within a volume. Because everyone is ultimately different in how they do research and
catalog coins, some of this "personality" shows up in their
work. For example,
RPC VII.1 (published in book form in 2006) is basically a die
catalog, with even minute varieties given their very own
RPC catalog number.
RPC IV (and its four parts), on the other hand, is not quite so exacting. That is why, for
RPC IV.2, 8951 (temporary), the 'V' in '
AVG" was put within parentheses. Coins with or without that letter, but which are the same in every other (described) respect, were considered similar enough to be placed under the same
catalog number. I should also point out here that the decision to do this was also probably due to practical reasons, such as cost and space. The Antonine Period (AD 138–192) encompasses a huge amount of coinage over a wide geographical
area and the course of many years. To give every minor coin variety during this time period a separate number would likely turn each printed
work into a heavy and expensive phone book!
As for the "temporary" suffix attached to
RPC IV.2, 8951, that simply means that the book for
part two of volume four has not been printed yet and that the editors are
still accepting coin submissions before cataloging the coins with permanent numbers.
And, lastly, yes!
RPC Online apparently only knows of three specimens of
RPC IV.2, 8951: one in the British Museum (L), one in the Staatliche Museen zu
Berlin (B), and one in the Geldmuseum of the Österreichische Nationalbank in
Vienna,
Austria (V-ON). Submit your coin, Jan, and make it four! There are instructions on the website for doing that. Here:
https://rpc.ashmus.ox.ac.uk/feedback/createYou can also e-mail the editors directly (like I have done in the past). If you are interested and need further
help with any of this, feel free to ask.
In any case, I
hope your original questions were answered!
Best regards,
Mark Fox
Michigan
