Roman provincial numismatics is still a comparatively young discipline. to the regular appearance on provincial coins of the portrait and name of the reigning emperor, much of the material is relatively straightforward to categorize chronologically. The appearance on the reverse of the issuing authority’s name and, often, a locally relevant design makes the process of attributing the coins to regions, cities and kings relatively easy, too. However, the broad geographical sweep of the provincial coinages, as well as the large number of issuing authorities, has until recently stifled attempts to organize and categorize the phenomenon as a whole. The advent of the Roman Provincial Coinage series is revolutionizing this field. The early volumes serve to highlight the fundamental difference between the Western part of the empire, where provincial coinages had entirely disappeared by the death of Tiberius (ad 1437), and the East, where provincial issues flourished throughout the late first century AD, reaching a high point in the Antonine and Severan periods, finally coming to an end in the reign of Tacitus (ad 275-76).
The insights offered by this vast body of material to the historian are considerable. At the highest level, the differing fortunes of coinage in the West and East serve to highlight fundamental differences in the monetary behavior of different parts of the empire (Burnett 2005). Differing explanations for the demise of the Western issues have been advanced according to the desire of the proponent to see local markets and issuers reacting to Roman economic superiority on the one hand, or a dirigiste central Roman state suppressing local economic autonomy on the other. Whichever end of the spectrum is preferred for the West, the circumstances in the East were undeniably different. The civic coinage of the East was almost entirely a low-value bronze affair, well adapted for exchange at the local level, but a far cry from the high-value silver coinages of earlier periods. The existence of these coinages opens up major avenues for the interpretation of the economies of the Roman East. At the same time, the physical appearance of these coinages, a hybrid of imperial iconography on the one hand and local civic pride on the other, encapsulates the tension between Roman center and local periphery in the most graphic and easily comprehensible form. A plethora of approaches to self-representation emerges on the reverse, in marked contrast to the uniformity of the obverse designs (Howgego et al. 2005). Technical numismatic study of the provincial coinage has revealed some evidence in the form of shared obverse dies for a level of coordination across civic mints (Kraft 1972; Johnston 1983). This fact, along with clear intervention on the part of the Roman state, such as in the maintenance of the closed-currency status of Egypt, or the production of local silver coinages with Latin legends in Asia, raises important questions about the extent of Roman control of the money supply in the East, no less than in the West.
World History
