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RIC Numbers

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Groover:
Hi, I was really excited to find one of my coins in the ID database section of dirtyoldcoins! It is Antoninus Pius with Fortuna on the reverse. Dirtyoldcoins lists it as RIC 251. You can see this listing at http://www.dirtyoldcoins.com/chitlins/id/ant.htm.

I then did a search on Google for "RIC 251". Now I am confused.

http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/ric/tetricus_II/i.html shows RIC 251 as being Tetricus II.

http://axesofevils.com/probvs/RIC.251.html shows RIC 251 as being Probus.

What is going on? I dont have any copies of the RIC volumes as I have just started out finding about my collection and really getting in to it. Am I misunderstanding the RIC numbers??

Groover

Robert_Brenchley:
That'll be RIC 251 of Tet 11. With the later emperors it also becomes important to list the mint, as each one is catalogued separately with its own numbering system.

maridvnvm:
The structure of RIC differs from volume to volume, of which there are 10. Each volume covers a period of history and the emperors that cover that time period and hence you can get several emperors within each volume.

Each individual emperor is given a separate section within the volume, with RIC Id's starting at 1 and rising.  So a full RIC Id is typically structured as Volume, Emperor, RIC Id. Typically the Volume and emperor are left off as it is often assumed that you already know this information.

For later coinage they took a different approach and listed the coinage by Mint. Let me take an example of RIC Volume VI, which lists the coinage for the time period by mint and all the emperors that issued coinage from that mint during that period. In this case the coinage from the mint each start at 1 and consecutive RIC Ids actually identify different reverse types by emperor.

In order to help you identify your coin, please post a picture to the Identification section and the people here will help fully identify it.

I hope this has helped clear from of the confusion.

Maridvnvm

cscoppa:
RIC numbers are very confusing at first. As are the other little things about RIC like some times they group varoius mintmarkings under one number and other times a change in the mintmark will change the RIC number.  Just study them and you will get the hang of them.

Chip

maridvnvm:
I agree with Chip. At first it is really confusing but once you know what volume you are dealing with then you just switch mind set to the way that the particular volume is structured.


Another strange numbering scheme appears with Probus. Here the RIC number identifies the Obverse legend, Reverse legend and reverse type but then lists the obverse types that are associated with this RIC Id and so a RIC Id doesn't identify an individual coin but a coin type with a list of known bust types.

The different volumes adapt to the coinage that was produced in the different time periods. This means that they are not consistent between volumes but do make some form of sense in the end.

Maridvnvm

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