In another
thread, Basemetal asked how often totally new
types turn up on
ancient coins.
Focusing on
Roman coins, the answer is that we certainly know all of the common
types, the ones that made up 99% of the coinage in circulation and that appear in dozens or hundreds of new examples in every large
hoard covering the period in question. The relative completeness of our knowledge is one of the advantages
numismatics has over other fields of study in
antiquity, say the study of Greek vase paintings or
Roman imperial
portraits in marble or bronze or
Roman historical reliefs.
However, it is quite common to find new variants of known coin
types, say a new
officina or new
bust type on late
Roman coins, or a known
type with a new date or in a new
denomination on earlier
Roman coins. Individually these new variants will all be
rare, but there are so many different ones out there that they seem to be turning up all the time.
Totally new
types occur infrequently, only once a decade or once a century for some emperors, maybe as frequently as once a year for some others. A lot of new
types have been turning up recently for
Pescennius Niger, for example.
It's easy to assume we know most of the original variants in a coinage, but every once in a while a new
type emerges which shows how incomplete our knowledge actually is. Below is an unpublished
sestertius of
Septimius Severus that I recently acquired, about which I wrote as follows to a friend who brought it to my attention:
"It's surprising to be reminded how much is missing, even in an eagerly collected and reasonably common coinage like
Severan sestertii of 211! The clear conclusion is that even in common coinages some
types were struck in small volume and have perished entirely, or at least not yet been discovered.
"On
denarii, two related
types were struck for all three emperors early in 211,
ADVENTVS AVGVSTI for all three and
FORT RED TR P XIX for
Sev., TR P XIIII no P P for
Car., and TR P III no P P for
Geta.
"The remnants of this issue on
sestertii are:
ADVENTVS AVGVSTI for
Geta, long unique in BM, until a second spec. appeared in the Friedrich Coll. in 1995, which I bought because it's different dies from the BM's.
"Now
FORT RED TR P XIX for SS, the
Rauch coin you discovered.
"
Still missing then, are
ADVENTVS AVGVSTI for
Sev. and
Caracalla, and
FORT RED no P P for
Caracalla and
Geta! Indeed each of these
types could appear in two variants for SS and
Car., (a) without
BRIT on
obv., strictly
mules from old
obv. dies, (b) with
BRIT.
"There are also
FORT RED dupondii and
asses for all three emperors.
ADVENTVS AVGVSTI would be possible here too, but maybe that
type was omitted on MB.
"I recall you got an unpubl.
Car.
aureus a few years ago with this same
FORT RED no P P
type of early in 211."
This issue is historically interesting, because it tells us something that is not in any of the surviving literary texts: that Septimius,
Caracalla, and
Geta, doubtless because of Septimus' illness,
had decided to break off their British campaign and return to
Rome even before Septimius died at York on 4 Feb. 211.