What Laodikeia Celal Simsek Actually Refers To
This term comes up in numismatic and epigraphic circles, specifically relating to cataloguing practices around the ancient city of Laodicea on the Lycus (modern-day Turkey). The name ties into how certain coin series and inscriptions have been attributed or re-attributed in scholarly literature over the past few decades. Celal Şimşek is a Turkish archaeologist and numismatist who has worked extensively on the material culture of the Laodicea region. His publications deal largely with the Roman-era coinage finds from excavations and surveys around the site. Researchers referencing "Laodikeia" coins often cross-reference his cataloguing work when trying to pin down dating or attribution for certain specimen groups. If you are chasing down specific coin types, his papers tend to list them with detailed die studies, which is useful but sometimes frustrating because the publications are in Turkish and not all of them are easily accessible outside academic libraries. I spent about three weeks tracking down a particular Laodicean bronze issue that a dealer listed as "Laodicea type X" and it turned out his numbering didn't match any of the standard references I had on hand — Sear, RPC, or the usual corpus. I ended up finding the correct attribution by looking through a conference proceedings volume that cited his work indirectly, which then led me back to the primary paper. That kind of rabbit hole is pretty common when working with this material.
One counter-intuitive thing about Laodicea coinage is that the city struck a massive volume of bronze issues during the 2nd and 3rd centuries AD, and many of them look nearly identical at first glance. The variations are often in the smallest details — a letter form, a wreath style, whether a particular emperor's title includes a specific honorific. Beginners tend to overvalue cosmetic differences and underweight the stratigraphic context. A coin that looks "different" might just be a later flan from the same master die, not a separate issue. I learned this the hard way when I spent a week convinced I had found a new magistrates series, only to realize the obverse dies were matching perfectly once I laid them side by side under magnification. The main bottleneck with Şimşek's work is access. Several of his excavation reports and preliminary publications are stuck in regional Turkish academic journals that aren't digitized. If you can read Turkish, it's manageable. If you can't, you're relying on secondary citations, which introduces errors of their own. A practical workaround is to use the Turkish Archaeology Network databases and the actual excavation reports from the Laodicea dig itself, which sometimes include English summaries. Those summaries cross-reference his attributions and can help you verify whether a given coin type has been accepted into the broader literature or remains contested. Another thing people miss is that Laodicea's coinage doesn't always follow the standard Roman imperial pattern. The city had a degree of monetary independence that shows up in its magistracy lists and in the way certain local deities appear on reverses. If you are building a reference set or doing attribution work, don't assume every Laodicean issue fits neatly into the RPC framework. There are outliers, and they tend to sit in the less-publicized excavation material rather than in the commercial coin market.
For anyone just getting started with this material, the most useful single reference is Şimşek's work on the Laodicea bronzes, even if you have to piece it together through citations and interlibrary loans. Pair it with the standard corpus references and you'll catch most of the common types without too much head-scratching. The ones that give you trouble are usually the post-3rd century issues where the minting becomes increasingly degraded and the die links get harder to establish. I'd recommend keeping detailed photos of both obverse and reverse at consistent magnification levels, because that's where the actual diagnostic features live, not in the general style or weight alone.
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