Cohen, Ed. Dated Coins of Antiquity: A comprehensive catalogue of the coins and how their numbers came about. (Lancaster, PA, 2011).
Hardbound. 656 pp., including appendices, drawings, maps, charts, and other illustrations; over 981 cataloged coins illustrated and more than 6,000 individually dated coins listed.
Dated Coins of Antiquity (DCA) is a substantially complete catalog of dated coins struck before the lifetime of Jesus Christ. Where a coin series such as the Biblical shekel of Tyre shown below crosses the millennium divide of 1 BC/AD 1, the catalog continues to its last dated coin in the AD era. The coins of antiquity used various kinds of numbers and more than 50 calendar systems for dating that have no familiarity to most modern readers. The dates and their numerals on the coins serve as historical markers for early advances in recording time. The book explores how the Greeks, Romans, Phoenicians, Nabataeans and Jews struggled to understand their own numbers as well as those of their competitors or conquerors. Especially the Greeks and Romans across Europe, Asia and Africa experimented with their numbers. Their calendars and notations for numbers varied among cities and even over time in the same city. As expected, they sometimes made mistakes when switching to different kinds of numbers.
Starting with the first dated coin struck by Zankle, Sicily in 494/493 BC, this book lists all coins displaying annual or monthly dates expressed in numbers or words. Nearly 100 issuing states or authorities are represented. The catalog describes more than 900 different type coins struck in gold, silver and bronze, exceeding 6,000 different dated coins, dozens of which are cited in no other catalog. It corrects the misreading of numerals in dates from earlier references on Ptolemaic Egypt and Alexandrian Sidon using Greek numbers, and early Tyre dated with Phoenician numbers. It also updates the BC dating of coins, such as those from Cappadocia, Cyprus, and Elymais, according to current research. Newly reported dates including photographs for the shekels and half shekels of Tyre are extensive. The catalog and a brief history of numbers draw on nearly 400 numismatic, history and science books and journals, more than a thousand coin auction catalogs, hundreds of Internet sales sites and the author 's collection.
DCA Rarity Guide with estimated number known and market availability (modified by Forum for brevity)
Common (C): >2000 known, abundant, usually currently available
Scarce (S): 500 - 2000 known, easy to find over a short period of time
Rare (R1): 25 - 500 known, appears one to three times per year on the market
Very rare (R2): 2 - 25 known, maybe available on the market one or two times in five years
Extremely rare (R3): 1 - 2 known, rarely offered, sometimes known from a single example in a museum collection
Unknown (U): no examples know for the date, none were probably struck, none probably exist