The last few weeks I've spent much of my free time looking over various websites of coins for sale and archives, specifically the as/dupondius featuring
Augustus,
Agrippa, and the
crocodile. My goal was to try and get a
handle on features used to identify and properly attribute this coin
type. At first glance it seemed there really wasn't a method to this madness but things started coming together. Features I though would be important seemed not to matter, such as:
1) The direction the vertical
palm bends at the top.
2) The placement and shape of the
crocodile’s eye.
3) The length and shape of the
crocodile’s legs.
4) Whether the upper teeth were pointing up or down.
5)
Weight – I don’t know if there is a convention but I’ve concluded that an As weighs 8 grams or less and a
Dupondius weighs over 9 g.
6) Most
had 1
wreath on L
side of
palm a few
had 2 wreaths flanking
palm.
7) Different coins w same reference were given different date ranges, have no idea how determined but I suspect
crocodile style has something to do with it.
Some descriptions of
Agrippa when obviously wearing both rostral crown &
laurel wreath only mentioned the crown and other times where I think he was wearing only the crown it mentioned the
wreath and every so often I'd see what appeared to be a band (crown) but not rostral (where I read rostral has to do with the beak or prow of a ship. Somewhere I read something about the progression of offices changing
head gear and P P so some of what I concluded as wrong could just be sloppy
work by someone wanting to hurry and get the
attribution done.
Then again – all my
work may be so far in left
field I’m not even in the ball park. But it was fun. When I finished my research I then cracked the books and the attached a pic of excel showing my results. These are my conclusions and if someone can better
help me get a hand on these I'm open to any suggestions.
