Help W/ Attribution

Hi,yes non doubt carinus,it's very nice....maybe you can clean it a bit more,or maybe you'll prefer leave it as it is,however compliments it's really beautiful!

Carinus is right and IMHO leave it as is. It looks good without further cleaning.

Very nice coin. Was this from and uncleaned lot?

Your coin is an RIC 325. Eddop expanded that into 325F S/XXI. The F recognizes that the coin has obverse bust type F (radiate cuirassed right) but that is the only way these come so that really adds nothing to the plain 325 in this case. 325 is a coin of Antioch when they were using nine workshops (officinae) noted by the Greek numeral (in this case S). S is the English letter most like the Greek numeral for 6. What we call this numeral varies on who you read. The original 6 was digamma, a letter the Greeks dropped from the alphabet centuries earlier but they needed something to stand in so we start seeing 'Stigma' which is like an S but often with the bottom look a bit smaller than the top or even more of a tail than a loop. It is a handwriting thing. Any workshop number still falls into RIC 325. Your reference to RIC 325v just means that the person writing it saw a difference between the coin and the RIC listing and added v for 'variety'. Every die was a bit different and there will be many listings by people who don't own or understand RIC so this could just mean that someone had a coin marked RIC 325 which had a different letter and did not realize that any 1-9 is still 325.

The listing for 329 is just wrong. 329 is a very similar coin of Tripolis and should have their city mark TR in the field. Tripolis did not number the shops in the same way as Antioch. It is a bit unfortunate that they put their mint city mark in the same place that Antioch did their shop number. Both cities issued coins with and without a star above the figures. This is noted in RIC but it does not change the RIC number. This is a 329 of Tripolis (with the star):




I know you get tired of my same old song but the confusion here comes from listing coins to RIC without actually looking them up in RIC. When you see a similar coin attributed to RIC 325, you need to know what RIC considered significant as a difference and what was all lumped into one number. This is hard to do without looking it up in the book itself. I am not saying everyone should run out and buy RIC (especially RIC volume V which is very out of date and soon to be replaced - we hope). I am suggesting to place less emphasis on forcing every coin you see into a numbered box. The proper description and cataloging for this coin uses words you can understand and not a number that you really don't know if applies or not.

Here is the reverse with the rest of the lot.