READING ROMAN COINS

ANCIENT ROMANS WERE practical-minded people; they didn't like wasted effort. Every letter on an ancient Roman coin die was painstakingly engraved by hand, so inscriptions on Roman coins are often heavily abbreviated. Generations of classical scholars have toiled to unravel the meaning of these cryptic abbreviations, so we can usually understand what the coins are trying to tell us.

Still, modern collectors are accustomed to a lot of specific information on a coin: the name of the country or issuing authority, the coin's denomination, the date of issue, the mintmark, and perhaps a motto (such as E PLURIBUS UNUM – "out of many, one" – on American coins).

Such information is usually missing on ancient coins. And, to complicate things, Roman inscriptions were usually written without spaces between words.

This article will consider a dozen coins issued across the long span of Roman history, to sample the enormous diversity of inscriptions.

ROMANO
The Latin alphabet is much like ours. Romans wrote the letter "U" as V. Some modern letters are missing ("J", "W"), while others ("K", "Y", "Z") appear mainly in words borrowed from Greek. All educated Romans could read Greek.

Anonymous. Circa 300/280-276 BCE. AR Didrachm (21mm, 7.12 g, 2h). Uncertain (Neapolis?) mint. Helmeted head of Mars left; oak spray to right / Horse's head right, wearing a bridle, on the base is inscribed ROMANO; stalk of grain to left. Crawford 13/1; Burnett 18 (Oc/R12); Sydenham 1; RSC 4. Classical Numismatic Group > Auction 112 11 September 2019 Lot: 465. Realized: 5,000 USD

The Romans also borrowed the idea of coinage from their neighbors, the Greek cities of southern Italy. Like many ancient Greek coins, one of the earliest Roman silver coins bears a single word, ROMANO, on a raised tablet below a horse head on the reverse, abbreviating the Latin ROMANORUM (literally, "of the Romans"). The "N" in the inscription is backward, suggesting that the engraver might have been unfamiliar with letters. The obverse shows a helmeted head of the war god, Mars.

This coin, a didrachm of about seven grams, dates from about 300-276 BCE. It was possibly struck at Neapolis (modern Naples). It brought $5,000 USD in a recent US auction. On many examples of this type, the word ROMANO is nearly worn off.

Reading the Romans
The standard reference for Roman coin inscriptions is A Dictionary of Roman Coins by Seth Stevenson (1784-1853), a monumental work of Victorian-era scholarship. Stevenson died before it could be completed, and the massive 929-page book was finally published in 1889 (reprinted in 1964); a searchable digital version is available online. Klawans (1995) has a detailed chapter on reading and understanding Roman coins. An inexpensive Latin-English dictionary, such as Traupman (2007), is a handy accessory for any serious collector of Roman coins.

There are also some excellent online resources for researching ancient Roman coin inscriptions–these include CoinArchives, ACSearch, Wildwinds, and OCRE. We hope to explore these, and others, in a future article.

To read the complete article, see:
Reading Ancient Roman Coins (https://coinweek.com/ancient-coins/reading-ancient-roman-coins/)

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