ID Help - Ancient Coin (Roman Provincial?)

Well it's all 'Greek' to me !

Start with what we can be certain .
Definitely Asklepios standing on the reverse with his serpent staff
Asklepios was very popular in the third century
Caracalla especially was fond of the 'cult'
The legend is readable
A M O P I on the left side
Checking quickly on wild winds there is only one place that matches .

Phrygia Amorion

The obverse legend of your coin is "DHMOS", or Demos "the people". Other coins from Amorium are more specific and say "DHMOS ROMAIWN", or "People of Rome".


Depends on the series, really. Roman Imperial are quite well covered, Greek and Roman Provincial, perhaps not quite so much. Wildwinds is essentially a Wiki; if no Wildwinds contributors have ever encountered such a coin, then it won't be there. Every catalogue, even the famed British Museum, is not going to be complete. WIldwinds is a pretty good one-stop-shop search platform for ancients and most of the coins you're likely to encounter can be found on there.

Actual mintage figures for ancient coins are of course unknown and unknowable; some coins are only known from only a few surviving examples. Let's consider the mint of Amorium, which we have zero actual historical or archaeological evidence for but was probably a small workshop just providing enough copper coins for that one relatively small city. Maybe they had just a single three-man minting team, with new dies being made on demand when an old die breaks. Suppose they're making Demos/Demeter coins, and the reverse Demeter die breaks; they make a new Asklepios reverse die and keep belting out coins using the new reverse and old reverse; maybe the Demos die breaks shortly afterwards so they make a new obverse die, and it's Boule instead of Demos, so all subsequent coins from those dies are Boule/Asklepios - that would make the Demos/Asklepios a "rare mule" in modern terminology, though it was by no means considered any kind of mistake or error at the time. It's also usually impossible to tell, since the vagaries of coin survival might mean a bucketful of "rare mules" just happens to survive, and the originally-far-more-common coins are now the rare ones.

The Ashmolean Museum database of Roman Provincial coins, more comprehensive than Wildwinds, has your coin: https://rpc.ashmus.ox.ac.uk/type/77070

The Museum itself does not have one. It's recorded from three examples: one in a museum in Ankara, one sold at auction in 2020 for £24 and one in a "private collection".