Another New Coin To Show **gordian III Ae30 - 238 Ad

This one is so cool! And it has a lot of history in it.
Where do you get pieces like this? I want them too! :)

The coins from Viminacium are an interesting series to collect. I assume you know that the legends are in Latin because the settlement was a garrasion town rather than a Romanised Greek city - where the legends were in Greek.

Are you 100% sure that it's year I? I can't really read anything where the year should be and to be honest that particular portrait looks too much like Gordian for it to be in his Year 1 when they tended to be unlike the later portraits (I suspect the mint masters didn't really know what he looked like for a while.)

It "might" be but if in doubt I'd leave that out.

Moushmov is an ok reference - it is free after all - but if you get serious about provincials there are a multitude of much better references. The problem with Moushmov is that he doesn't illustrate the coins, only general types, which is kinda useless for id'ing provincials when die matching is important - unlike the Imperial series where it is much less so (probably because it is so much harder).

Best of luck

colosfi - that really depends. There is not really one overarching book on Roman Provincials and most of them are not in English.

Probably the nearest thing is the set of Varbanov's four books - originally in Bulgarian but now also in English

http://www.varbanovbooks.com/Introduction.html

but even then that only covers the Balkan region and doesn't attempt to look at the hundreds of mints in what is now Turkey and the middle east.

And they are not cheap - probably about £250-£300 for the set.

Then for each other city or area that you look at you would probably have to look at a specialised reference - and again they are not cheap either. For example, the city of Deultum (also covered by Varbanov - but he doesn't illustrate everything) would be a volume of the Ruse collection as part of the Sylloge Nummorum Gracorum series. I think mine cost about £60 but it's by far the best.

The Sylloge Nummorum Gracorum is a set of books covering the Greek issues but which, in some cases, cover Roman Provincial issues as well. They are disparate, in French, German, Bulgarian, Italian and Spanish as well a a few in English. They used to be the only source of information on Roman Provincials but increasingly there are other sources available.

For Nicopolis ad Istrum and Markianopolis issues there are two excellent books from Hristova/Jekov. They are well illustrated but they are only available in Bulgarian.

Then there are the British Museum collections - the RPC (Roman Provincial coinage). They have only issued three volumes to date - but a fourth in conjunction with the Paris museum is due out -- but it's been due out for years - I've contributed some coins to it. They will probably set you back about £300 for the set.

If your interest lies in collecting the Provincial coinage of one particular child emperor like Diadumenian - then I'd really recomend this one

http://www.lulu.com/product/hardcov...nian/6318745

It's really good and very reasonably priced -- but then I would say that as it's mine :)

I think if I were you I'd stick to online references for a while until you see how you get on. It would be easy to spend £2,000 on Provincial references and you still wouldn't cover everything.

This link is to the books I used when compiling my own material

http://www.diadumenian.com/references.html


good luck