As you know, the
complete "
Sear" for
provincials has already been undertaken,
RPC of which the first two volumes covering 44 BC-AD 96 have appeared so far.
Provincial coinage of the second and third certuries AD is so much more voluminous than that of the first century and shows such an endless variety of
types and legends that I am afraid
RPC will inevitably fall short of covering it anything like completely. However several of the volumes in question are well underway and there is no doubt that they will be an immense improvement over the catalogues that have existed so far.
I only regret that
RPC has missed the only natural and logical way to study
provincial coins, namely region by region and within each region
mint by
mint, each mint's coinage being catalogued chronologically from beginning to end in one and the same listing, more or less as in
Eckhel,
Mionnet,
BMC,
AMNG, RG and so on. You cannot understand the
provincial coinage of a particular reign at a particular
mint without studying the coinage of the same
mint during the preceding and following reigns. To do so, you will continuously have to be pulling down volume after volume of
RPC, because of its unfortunate reign by reign or era by era arrangement.
One added and relatively minor inconvenience: I can foresee that it is going to be maddening to try to locate the "semi-autonomous"
provincials in the completed
RPC, because their chronology is not immediately obvious and you won't know what volume to look in!
