Posted 06/02/2015 7:56 pm
Quote:
It should help that I studied both Latin and Ancient Greek, although sadly it was 50 years ago.
It should help that I studied both Latin and Ancient Greek, although sadly it was 50 years ago.
It actually helps less than you might expect. Reading Greek and Latin in a nice, neat, black-and-white modern textbook is quite different to trying to read it when it's carved into a weathered piece of marble, or onto a corroded coin. When I toured Turkey last year, there was a fellow on the tour who was a Bible College lecturer in ancient Greek - and he couldn't make heads or tails out of most of the inscriptions carved into the ruins. I've never formally studied Greek or Latin at all, but I could easily pick out certain words, particularly the names and places - and this only because of my experience in reading coins.
Consider your Greek and Latin training "theory", and your coins "practical".
Let's take your first coin here as an example: the obverse legend says "DNVALEN SPFAVG" (you do have to get used to the late-Roman tendency to spread letters out, meaning A can look like H and M can look like IIII). A Classical Latin scholar is probably confused by this at first glance, and even at second glance. An experienced coin collector automatically reads this as "D N VALENS P F AVG" and knows (or can easily find out) that this is abbreviation for "Dominus noster Valens Pius Felix Augustus" (Our Master Valens, pious, fortunate, senior-emperor).
As for good books for beginners, I can recommend the six-volume "Ancient Coin Collecting" series by Wayne G. Sayles. They give broad overviews of each ancient coinage series and give helpful advice on how to identify and attribute. For Romans such as these, I would suggest trying to get your hands on a second-hand copy of an old all-in-one-volume Third or Fourth edition of the Sear catalogue. The latest "Millennium" edition is better in many respects, but it's multi-volume and huge - the fifth volume is only just finished - and buying all five books is a rather expensive purchase if you've only got a couple of Romans. The introductory chapters in Sear are excellent guides for identifying reverse types, mintmarks and such.
Don't say "infinitely" when you mean "very"; otherwise, you'll have no word left when you want to talk about something really infinite. - C. S. Lewis
