This
provincial bronze of Severus Alexander from Abydus in Troas (Conventus of
Adramyteum) is interesting, to me at least, for a couple of reasons. The
architectural reverse of a temple pictured in perspective is a unique variant
with the gable end to the left, all other extant specimens have the pediment to
the right.
What is perhaps more interesting than the design variation is that this coin is die linked to three other cities. Dario Calomino published, in the Burnett festschrift, a set of die links, building on Konrad Kraft”s pioneering work from the early 1970s, that demonstrates a level of organisation and control beyond what was expected in the Roman provincial coinage. Rather than individual cities striking their own, often intermittent, coinage there was, in some circumstances, a centralisation of production. This is something that we don’t always appreciate. I've paced my specimen on top of specimen 6 in the above illustration.
Thus we have a coin here that shares an obverse die with coins of Sestus (Chersonesus, Thrace) [coins 5, 9], Methymna (Lesbos) [coins 8, 10] and Eresus (Lesbos) [coin 7].
