How Unknown Tokens Were Identified In 1983. We Have Come A Long Way.

Immediate or instantaneous replies are an unfortunate drain on that word patience.

Slowly, and patiently.

I had something of a taste of what it must have been like. Back in 1999, I purchased this coin from Trebizond. It was poorly identified on the 2x2 I bought it in. I didn't have a copy of the Sear Byzantine catalogue and when I bought one shortly afterwards, I found that Trebizond coins weren't considered "Byzantine" enough for inclusion. I didn't have any internet back then, either, and if I had I probably wouldn't have been able to find the info I needed. So I did my research the old fashioned way.

Neither my physical copy of the Encyclopedia Britannica nor the CD version of Grolier's had even have a list of Trebizond emperors I could look up. So I went to the university library to find books on Trebizond. The library had catalogues of ancient Greek, Roman and Byzantine coins, none of which included Trebizond of course. I finally found a pretty good book, which mentioned the coins and the inscriptions the emperors put on them. From this, I finally managed to ID the coin properly, as a silver asper of Grand Comnenus John II. The whole process took me a couple of months of during-lunchtime searches.