The first step in learning anything about a coin is to be able to decipher the clues given in its design. Fortunately, Roman emperors wanted you to know who was pictured on the coin’s obverse. Even better, the Romans gave birth to the Latin alphabet making the inscriptions quite readable assuming they’re not too worn or missing. Lastly, the coins themselves follow very predictable conventions in their designs so that what is learned for one coin can be applied in identifying the next.
If you had absolutely no previous knowledge of Roman coinage and one came into your possession where would you start your search on figuring out more about it? Assuming it’s in decent enough shape at least some part of the legend should be readable.
Let’s take an ordinary coin, the sort one may find for sale on eBay for ten or twenty bucks. It may look something like this:
Note that in this example the face is obscured by gunk as are some of the letters. If it were your first coin you’d realize that looking through a book or database for a face match would be a headache. The legend around his head though holds the key to home in a lot quicker. Disappointingly, it all looks like one massively long word. Surely no one had a name that long. What to do? Fortunately, the majority of Roman coins follow a few rules that once understood make understanding those legends a whole lot easier.
First off, the Romans may have given us the alphabet but, believe it or not, they did not invent spacing. Where great care was taken they occasionally put dots in between that served this function but mostly they expected you to just kind of figure it out. Secondly, they had not yet thought of small case either. This is why you may have noticed that on every old building in Rome inscriptions are always in BLOCK TYPE and the custom stuck so that nowadays every courthouse façade is in upper case as well. As one last layer of complexity, the Romans were great fans of stuffing a lot of information into a small place for which they heavily relied on abbreviations, initials and acronyms. So, knowing this, if we were to follow the Roman style we could write out a phrase like “Mister Potato Head” as MRPOTATOHEAD.
One final clue that you need to know is that on nearly every Roman coin the name of the emperor will be stuck somewhere in that string of letters. In the vast majority of cases taking the formula BLAH BLAH RULER NAME BLAH (without spaces!). So now all you need to do is try and pick out the letters that are likeliest to be that of a person’s name and look for a match to begin your search.
Can you find a name encoded in the coin above?
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