Online and in-person webinar/seminar at the Salle des conférences, Bibliothèque nationale de France, 5 rue Vivienne, 75002 Paris, 26 May 2023, 3-6pm (Paris), 2-5pm (London), 9am-12pm (New York)

For Zoom link please email: OnlineGreekCoinage@gmail.com

In recent years, the presence of ancient coinage on the worldwide web has been transformed by the creation of online typologies, designed to categorise the myriad coinages of the Greaco-Roman world. Many users are now familiar with resources devoted to Roman coinage¹. Until recently, the Greek world was more fragmented.

In September 2022 the ARCH Portal was launched in an aim to change that. It provides an access to the diversity of Greek coinages through a simple research (iconography, metal, mint, region authority, etc.). Within a single tool, searches across a group of separately conceived and published regional corpora of ‘Greek’ coinage are now unified. This webinar/seminar is designed to introduce both the ARCH Portal and the individual corpora that underlie it. What is included? How is it organised? What results can I expect? How can I contribute? It is the aim of this seminar to answer all these questions and more. Participants are welcome to join us for those sections that seem most relevant to them, and they are welcome to join in person or online.

Programme

Introduction

• 3.00-3.15     Frédérique Duyrat: The ARCH project

Part 1. How do I search for Greek coins and iconography?

• 3.15-3.45     Andrew Meadows and John Pybus: How to search Greek coins and Greek types in ARCH, and introducing the CHANGE project.

Part 2. What will I get? The component parts of ARCH: Organisational principles, presences and absences

• 3.45-4.00     Peter Van Alfen: 1. Hellenistic Royal Coinages
• 4.00-4.15     Ulrike Peter and Bernhard Weisser: 2. Corpus Nummorum–Thrace, Mysia, Troas
• 4.15-4.30     Pere Pau Ripollès and Manuel Gozalbès: 3. Moneda Iberica – Spain
• 4.30-4.45     Julien Olivier: 4. IRIS – civic, federal, dynastic and other royal coinages
• 4.45-5.00     Moderated question session

Part 3. How can I contribute data?

• 5.00-5.10     Andrew Meadows: Introduction
• 5.10-5.30     Ethan Gruber: Integrating collections
• 5.30-6.00     Moderated question session

Ancient numismatics online: a short history

Over the last few years, the availability of resources devoted to ancient coinage has undergone a revolution. The underpinning for this has been the Nomisma project, founded and hosted at the American Numismatic Society (ANS) in New York. By providing common vocabularies, it has fostered the creation of an entire eco-system of interoperable digital resources across disciplinary, national and linguistic boundaries. The result has been nothing short of a revolution.

The story began with Roman coinage, and the development by the ANS, with funding from the NEH, of Online Coins of the Roman Empire (OCRE). This makes available the full typology (41,703 varieties) of Roman coinage as described in the 10 printed volumes of Roman Imperial Coinage. With help from the British Museum, this was quickly followed by Coins of the Roman Republic Online (CRRO), which does the same job for the 1,747 varieties in Michael Crawford’s Roman Republican Coinage. Through the generosity of Kris Lockyear at the Institute of Archaeology (UCL) in London, CRRO is accompanied by Coin Hoards of the Roman Republic (CHRR), which summarises where such coins have been found. An ongoing project at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, Coin Hoards of the Roman Empire (CHRE) hosts a parallel data set for Imperial coinage, to accompany OCRE. Finally there is now the online version of Roman Provincial Coinage (RPC), also based at the Ashmolean, which means that all coinage produced by Rome or within its provinces will soon have an online typology and stable online identifiers in the form of URIs. The impact of this movement on cataloguing practices has been substantial. There are now more than 54 institutions and projects in nine different countries cataloguing their coins with OCRE URIs, for example. And this means that the 178,407 Roman imperial coins catalogued by these projects can be easily seen within the OCRE portal.

The last couple of years have seen similar development for British Iron Age (‘Celtic’) coinage, thanks to the work of a team at the Institute of Archaeology and Ashmolean Museum in Oxford. We now have a typology, Iron Age Coinage in Britain (IACB) and an accompanying database of finds, the Celtic Coin Index Digital (CCID).

So where does that leave the Greek world?

Because there was no pre-existing overview of non-Roman, non-Iron Age coinage, work on Greek coinage has been more fragmented. In New York, the ANS has been busy creating a typology of Hellenistic Royal Coinages (HRC); in Valencia in Spain, a team based the University and the Museum of Prehistory, funded by MINECO, have produced Moneda Iberica (MIB), a typology for the whole of pre-Roman Spain. In Berlin, teams based at the Münzkabinett, and the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy, funded by the DFG, are working on typologies devoted to Thrace, Mysia and the Troad as part of the Corpus Nummorum project. An ongoing project based at Oxford, funded by the ERC (CHANGE) is creating a typology for the rest of Asia Minor. And finally, a project funded by the AHRC in the UK, the ANR in France and MINECO in Spain, has allowed the creation of two resources to bring everything together. These are the IRIS typology, which provides a basic typology for all of Greek coinage not included in the other projects, and the ARCH portal which, by the miracle of Linked Open Data, creates a unified search engine across all the other Greek-related resources. This currently searches 28,371 different coin types.

The ARCH Community

1. Such as CRRO, OCRE, and RPC Online [↩]

---

---