Help Indentifying Possibly Unsual Constantius II

Finn,
Thank you for the link to tesorillo.com. I was hoping that eventually Guido Bruck's Kupferpraegung would be available online. This site used that as a jumping off point and very artfully rendered from actual coins a lot of the illustrations Bruck had originally drawn. Nice!

Since they were redoing the work from the ground up, and making connections to RIC, I wish they would have matched the bust types to the RIC numbering and given a reference table correlating the busts to the mints that produced each type. That is the sort of tool that would be needed to identify the OP coin here according to all of the possible RIC listings. The nice thing about a website, it that such an addition could still be done.

Despite that, this is an outstanding reference which I was very happy to bookmark. I doff my hat to you, sir.

The thing that strikes me as odd is the fact that the nose is just an outline, and the lips are separated from the rest of the face.

From what I have read, Roman mint-makers had a master portrait punch which was kept under lock and key when it wasn't being used to sink a new obverse die. There were many master portraits, but the dies werent made from scratch. If the die became clogged or worn, I could see a mint employee just grabbing a pick and "fixing" it, rather than bugging the supervisor to get the big boss to make a new die.

Conversely, notice the environmental damage that is gumming up the detail on the reverse. If the discoverer/cleaner of this coin was too hasty with metal tools, they could have just scraped out the damaged copper, leaving where they thought the nose and lips should be. Notice the different color around the area in question.

Regardless of the scenario, I feel that something happened there.

Thankyou for the link Finn235, A great reference tool I didn't know existed.

Interesting I never thought to look at the lips in detail. Under a magnifying glass there's wear around the lips but doesn't look like it has been scraped. Perhaps like you say it came from a worn die