'Bodleian Library, Add MS C 297, is a volume of over 300 folios of Ussher’s notes and tables on chronology. Most of the pages are dense and detailed, and there seem to be very few mentions of coins:
- On f.191v, on the third-century emperors Carinus and Numerian, he reproduced some of the inscriptions and types, citing Onofrio Panvinio, Scaliger, Occo and Goltzius. The way that Occo is added in the margin, with page references, suggests that he himself may well have looked up in Occo’s book the coins mentioned by others.
- A coin of Trajan is described on the poorly preserved f.193r, citing ‘Nummus apud Adolphum Occonem, edit. August. an. 1601. pag. 214’. The context seems to be the history of the late first and early second century, as one might perhaps have expected. As the coin cites Trajan’s 20th tribunician power, one would guess that Ussher was using it to assess the length of Trajan’s reign, as he was doing for Nerva at the same place (using other sources).
- ff.195r–v is a list of coin inscriptions, on both sides of a piece of paper, and a later hand has annotated the page ‘This is my Ld. Primates hand tho not so well written’ (!). The lists have been corrected and annotated, e.g. with ‘aenei nummi’ or ‘non Maxentius’ (the latter with a line to the name of Magnentius in a coin inscription). The recto also includes a little drawing giving the size and weight of a shekel (‘sicli crassitudo’ and ‘sicli quantitas’), presumably unrelated to the list since the ‘shekel’ is presumably a Jewish one: this must be the one in the royal collection that Ussher weighed for Selden and Greaves. Here again we see Ussher personally examining and recording coins, and the page is indeed very reminiscent of the ones made in Wales in 1645.
- ff.212–13r is a series of notes (not in Ussher’s hand) on three Jewish topics, including ‘Ex Aria Montano de Siclo’.'
(Burnett 2020b, p. 475)
