Friday 30 October 2009

Jugate Carausius and Sol

I’ve been doing a study of this jugate Sol “series” and I now think that Curtis Clay is correct in suggesting that the Hunter specimen is the one illustrated in Stukeley’s plates as I can find no reference to any other examples pairing this obverse type with this reverse legend (excepting my own example, of course).

I now have images of eleven of the twelve examples of the jugate Sol coins known to me and it is apparent that this is more than a single issue when looking at the spread of mint marks (C, CXXI and S/P//C) and the corpus is represented by four distinct obverse dies.

Five of the coins are in the British Museum (one of which, BM 1992,0635.1, must be mis-catalogued on the basis of the die links now known to me; another of the British Museum coins, BM1863,0325.4, is clearly the same specimen as the one illustrated, but not owned, by Kennedy in his “Dissertation upon Oriuna”, from 1751 ), two in the Hunter collection in Glasgow, five in private hands. I need to check the Cambridge and Oxford collections (sadly the Heberden Coin Room is undergoing a reorganisation and so is not dealing with enquiries at present) to see if they hold any further specimens.