How Far Back Can We Go? Fourth Edition! Ended At 1461 Waiting On 1460 C. E. (A. H. 864)

excellent progress today and yesterday and the day before etc etc etc for > 500 consecutive days

I wonder: if CCF would have access to all collected dated coins in the world - what would be the year where this game would always end ?

Assuming that there are no date gaps in the Islamic - Arab-Sassanian - Sassanian proper lineage (I have no idea whether there actually are any), the first possibly missing date should be 495 AD.

My search attempts gave inconclusive results on whether any coins are known from that year (or any other year in the first half of the 490s); the (fairly rare) dated Gupta coinage apparently covers much of the 5th century, but very spottily (it doesn't help that most dates are off flan).

If it is possible to get across the 5th century (whether through the Guptas or otherwise), thanks to the Bosporans, the Western Kshatrapas, the Parthians, the Seleukids, and several other coin-dating places, there should be no gaps between ca. 380 AD and ca. 150 BC; I have no idea how far back we could go after that (my best guess is 3rd century BC).

[EDIT: turns out that this is not true. My current best guess, assuming no 5th century gap, is 356 AD. There really appears to be no gap past 330 AD, however.]


That said, it's perfectly possible that there is actually an unattested date in, say, the 11th century AD (when Islamic dated coins are apparently scarce).

I never intended anything involving you going away from that tradition.

I just propose that, if the date when the 5th edition reaches the same year as this one, and thus the 6th edition starts, ends up being in the second half of December 2019, said 6th edition should start with a coin dated 2020 (assuming, of course, that any such coins had already been issued by that time).

Makes sense to me.

Excellent!

Sorry for not including this in my prior post, but I want to specifically and separately call out @pepactonius for his (her?) amazing dedication to these OFEY threads. @jbuck is a capable adminstrator and wonderful cheerleader, but it is @pepactonius who leads the way with a new post at 12:01 am EST *every* single day.

Speaking of 4th/5th centuries from yesterday's posts, 382 and 482 are proving to VERY allusive. There might be rare late Roman gold issues, but I've never seen anything copper / silver. Any tips where I might want to look, other kingdoms have something?

Western Kshatrapas have 382 in silver, good luck finding one, but they definitely exist.

I'm not sure whether 482 even exists. Sassanian dates have a several-decade gap at that point. Bosporans stopped dating their coins long before; Byzantines didn't start until much later.
Gupta dates might include it, but few Gupta coins have dates at all, and I couldn't find anything remotely systematic on dated Gupta coins online that wasn't either "here's two or three random examples" or written in the 19th century.
(For the record, no, the dates as catalogued in the 19th century references I found did not include 482, but I thought that maybe an example was found later.)

the 1481 double briquet from Antwerp is splendid !

extrememy clear date
and a nice human hand between the lions; we discussed this mint mark about 100 days ago in this thread