Walking Back In Time From 1600 To Antiquity By Decades (V2.0)

Victor, that's a very nice coin in a much higher grade than I usually see them. Beautiful.

A contribution from me, then. I like that this coin references the Parthians (twice!)

I'm going to borrow the reverse description from OCRE because it's a lot of things to type.

Marcus Aurelius. 165-166 AD
AR Denarius. 19.0mm, 3.3g
Rome mint. RIC III 163a

Obv: M ANTONINVS AVG ARM PARTH MAX
Laureate bust right.

Rev: TR P XX IMP IIII COS III
Victory, naked to waist, standing front, head right, holding palm, upright, in right hand and with left hand fixing shield, inscribed VIC PAR, on palm-tree right

My own Lucilla.

Lucilla. ca. 161 AD.
(under the authority of Marcus Aurelius/Lucius Verus)
AR Denarius. 17.0mm, 2.96
Rome. RIC III 762 (var rev. legend), RSC 14

Obv: LVCILLAE AVG ANTONINI AVG F
Draped bust right, diademed and braided hair

Re: DIAN-A LVCIFERA
Diana standing left, holding torch across body

We can easily reach BC. The problem is that attribution of coins to specific dates in BC (and even specific decades) gets more difficult apart from Roman Republican issues and some Greek issues, e.g. There are probably other issues that can be reliably dated to within a decade or two.

Part of the difficulty beyond that is that some designs were minted for decades, or even over a century. I have some small Greek bronzes where the best date range that can be approximated is along the lines of "200-100 BC" or "450-300 BC" and so on.

I'm hopeful, although yesterday was the first day in some time that we didn't make any progress. Hopefully someone (@vic?) has a coin from the decade of the 150s to post so that we can continue our progress. This decade is still a hole in my collection.




100% agree with this statement. For example, below is a lead coin from the Ananda Dynasty that dates to between 160 and 345 AD. See this old CCF thread for more info: http://goccf.com/t/283017. Being unable to pin coins down to a specific decade is going to become harder and harder I think.

Antoninus Pius
A.D. 150- 151
AR Denarius
17x18mm 3.2gm
IMP CAES T AEL HADR ANTONINVS AVG PIVS P P; Laureate head right.
TR POT XIIII COS IIII; Pax stg. l. holding branch and sceptre, PAX in exergue.
RIC III Rome 200c

Very nice!

Nice example!

I've been pretty busy and haven't been able to post much.

My only "140s" coin is a Parthian drachm of Vologases IV but it has the range 147-191 so probably not really applicable here.