The Roman Imperial Coinage

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The Roman Imperial Coinage (RIC) is an English-language catalog about the coins of the Roman Empire. It begins with the Battle of Actium in 31 BC. BC, with which Octavian (Augustus) became the sole ruler of Rome, and ends in late antiquity with the beginning of the rule of the emperor Anastasius in the year 491, as he initiated a comprehensive reform of the currency, which from the point of view of numismatics traditionally as the end of the Roman and beginning of the Byzantine coinage applies.

Since most of the RIC's volumes were published in the 1930s and 1940s, numerous new finds over the past sixty years have made them partly obsolete. A revision of volume 1 by Carol HV Sutherland appeared in 1984. Volume 2 was divided into two half-volumes for the revision, of which volume 2.1 (at the time of Flavier ) by Ian Carradice and Theodore Buttrey was published in 2007.

Alongside the Coins of the Roman Empire in the British Museum and the Roman Provincial Coinage, the Roman Imperial Coinage catalog is the most important standard work on the coins of the Roman Empire.

The volumes

The RIC is divided into a total of thirteen volumes:

About the volumes

A detailed coin history was written for each individual emperor . The coins of the individual emperors are arranged in mints and in this category under the same denominations.

For every single coin there is a detailed description of the front and back sides and the direction of the stamp. There is also a description of the rarity.

The letter C stands for "common", ie "often".

The letter R stands for "rare", although there are further subdivisions:

  • R1 (about twenty copies)
  • R2 (between five and fifteen copies)
  • R3 (about five copies)
  • R4 (two or three copies)
  • R5 (unique)

This information on the frequency of the different coins is no longer up-to-date, as numerous hoard finds mean that some types are nowhere near as rare as they were half a century ago.

There are coin tablets on the last pages of each book that have an image on some of the coins.

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