Author Archive: royalnumsoc

‘Cotton to Gold: extraordinary collections of the industrial northwest‘, exhibition held at Two Temple Place, London, September to November 2015, featuring discoveries from the Blackburn collection.

by Rebecca Darley

Museums and stately homes across the country have numismatic collections which are often not widely known about. Indeed, museum collections of all kinds can lie forgotten or unseen due to changes in funding, curatorial interests or access to specialist expertise, only to be rediscovered – a new kind of buried treasure. In recent years the Money and Medals Network has been working with numerous collections across the UK to help curators and visitors make the most of their collections. Meanwhile, numismatic collectors and scholars have always been crucial to the creation and understanding of numismatic knowledge, often providing their time voluntarily through this Society and other numismatic societies across Britain and the world, or supporting collections local to them.

The Blackburn Museum and Art Gallery has been working tirelessly over the last five years to develop its facilities and raise awareness of its collections, which include world-class holdings of early printed books and manuscripts, as well as a magnificent numismatic collection, with especially good selections of Hellenistic, Roman and Sasanian material. Some of this material was exhibited in Autumn 2015 at Two Temple Place, London. ‘Cotton to Gold: extraordinary collections of the industrial northwest‘ (see review by Claudia Prtichard, The Independent here), focussed on the way in which industrial entrepreneurs in northern England often used their resources to build eclectic and fabulous collections of art and antiquities. These were then frequently left to their local town and city museums.

Building on this exhibition, the Institute of English Studies and Birkbeck, University of London, together with the Blackburn Museum and Art Gallery, and the University Centre at Blackburn College are pleased to announce an international conference on the R.E. Hart Collections at the Blackburn Museum and Art Gallery. ‘Something for my native town’ will take place on 9th and 10th November 2017. Beginning on Thursday 9th November from 4pm to 6pm at Blackburn Museum and Art Gallery there will be the official opening of the new Level 2 Collections Research Room and a chance to view manuscripts and coins from the Hart Collection with the museum Curators. On Friday 10th November there will be a Full day conference at University Centre at Blackburn College with a plenary lecture by Professor David McKitterick. Full programme to be confirmed.

More information about this exciting event and the opportunity to register to attend can be found here.

Report on funds received from the Classical Numismatic Group Roman and Byzantine Fund

by Marleen Termeer

A Royal Numismatic Society grant enabled me to give a lecture on coinage production in Latium and the Latin colonies in the Middle Republic at the conference Oltre “Roma medio repubblicana”: il Lazio fra i Galli e Zama in Rome (Rome, 7-9 June 2017).

This important conference was organized, together with its counterpart on Mid-Republican Rome (5-7 April 2017), with the aim of bringing together a variety of sources and perspectives on the city of Rome and the Latin world from the beginning of the fourth to the end of the third centuries BC (more information available here). My lecture was one of two to focus on the numismatic material. I discussed the significance and the potential of the coinages of Latin colonies in Latium and beyond as a source for understanding the relation between Rome and the colonies. In addition, I was able to introduce the topic of a postdoctoral research project that I am currently preparing. This project will investigate the first (pre-denarius) Roman coins and contemporary Italic and Greek productions in relation to Roman state formation. It challenges the assumption of a strict relation between coin production and state authority in the Mid Republic, and instead develops and investigates the hypothesis that different actors produced coinages that were functional to, and sometimes even representative of, the Roman state.

My participation in this conference allowed me to make new contacts and get some important feedback, both on the general purposes of my research project and on specific source material and publications that are important in this context. In addition, it allowed me to develop a broader perspective on the coinages that I study, as many other contributors to the conference addressed similar themes, but based on other textual and material sources. Finally, I hope to have been able to communicate the importance of the numismatic material to address the broad theme of the developing relations between Rome and Italy in the Mid Republican period to an audience of ancient historians and archaeologists.

Key references

Burnett, A.M. 2012, Early Roman coinage and its Italian context. In The Oxford Handbook of Greek and Roman Coinage. Oxford U.P.

Burnett, A.M. & M.H. Crawford 2014, Coinage, Money and Mid-Republican Rome: Reflections on a recent book by Filippo Coarelli. Annali. Istituto italiano di numismatica 60, 231-265

Burnett, A.M. & M.C. Molinari 2015, The Capitoline Hoard and the Circulation of Silver Coins in Central and Northern Italy in the Third Century BC. In P.G. van Alfen, G. Bransbourg and M. Amandry (eds.) FIDES: Contributions to Numismatics in Honor of Richard B. Witschonke. New York: the American Numismatic Society, 21-119.

Cantilena, R. 2000, Nomen Latinum: la monetazione. Appunti per una discussione. In Gentes fortissimae Italiae. I Convegno sui Popoli dell’Italia antica. Atina: Centro di studi storici Saturnia, 41-56.

Coarelli, F. 2013, Argentum signatum. Le origini della moneta d’argento a Roma. Rome: Istituto italiano di numismatica

Rutter, N. K. (ed.), 2001, Historia numorum. Italy. London: British Museum Press.

Termeer, M.K. 2016, Roman colonial coinages beyond the city-state: a view from the Samnite world. Journal of Ancient History 4(2), 159-190

Martin Hallmannsecker 

Thanks to the general support of the Royal Numismatics Society, I was able to attend the summer school on Greek and Roman numismatics organised by the National Hellenic Research Foundation, Athens from 3-12 July 2017.

The summer school was aimed at students of all stages with basic to no knowledge of numismatics and provided lectures on general topics (e.g. the invention of coinage, metrology, hoards, iconography) as well as on more specific matters (e.g. Archaic and Classical coins, Athenian coinage, Hellenistic coins, Roman and Roman Provincial coinage, online databases). In addition to that, we visited the most relevant numismatic collections of Athens (Numismatic Museum, KIKPE collection at the Benaki Museum, Alpha Bank collection, Akropolis Museum) where we were able to handle and even strike our own (plasticine) coins. Very helpful for the understanding of the production process of coins and the workings of Athenian economy was a field trip to the silver mines of Laurion which are usually closed to the public.

Especially the chapter of my DPhil thesis which is based on a reinterpretation of a series of bronze coins from the Antonine period will benefit greatly from what I have learned on this course. Now I feel more confident to put my findings into a larger context and am even considering to conduct a die study. I would definitely recommend this summer school to every student in ancient history who wants to get a comprehensive overview of the field of Greek and Roman numismatics.

by Rebecca Darley

As you may have noticed, the RNS now has a blog. With new posts going up every two weeks (on a Sunday night), the ‘Notices’ section of the RNS website provides a space to promote events and publications, share news about numismatic discoveries and projects and celebrate the work of the RNS in the form of posts contributed by recipients of our grants. In the last month these notices have received 47,726 views, representing over 2,500 individuals visiting the site. this number is growing as we continue to work on the website and publish new notices. So, if you feel that an up-coming or completed project, recent publication, or event that you are organising could benefit from several thousand views per month from interested numismatists, or you have a discovery or numismatic story you would like to share, please consider writing a post for our ‘Notices’ section. Submissions should be between 250 and 1200 words (submitted as a Word file), with at least one image related to the text (jpeg, tif, gif) and can be sent to Rebecca Darley at r.darley@bbk.ac.uk. Some editing may be necessary to conform to the house style of the blog, but this will be light and you will consulted if it alters your content or meaning in any significant way. All formatting and links can be done for you. If you have never written a blog post before, if the list of specifications above sound mystifying or off-putting but if you still feel like there is something which you would like to appear in ‘Notices’, please just drop me an email (r.darley@bbk.ac.uk) describing your idea and I will be happy to provide an IT or editorial support necessary.

Report by F. Sinsi

Silver coin of Phraates IV, minted in Parthia. British Museum collection. Image used from the British Museum SNP project page.

The grant from the Nicholas Lowick Memorial Fund awarded by the Royal Numismatic Society allowed me to spend the period 5th-11^th February 2017 in London, working at the Department of Coins and Medals of the British Museum from Monday 6^th to Friday 10^th for the international project Sylloge Nummorum Parthicorum (SNP), co-directed by M. Alram and V.S. Curtis.

In this week I had the chance to examine the Parthian coins held by the BM that will be included in volume 5 of SNP (Phraates IV-Orodes III), on which I am currently working.

The other important task of this week was, however, to coordinate with the British Museum team of the SNP (V.S. Curtis, E. Pendleton, A. Magub). This team is now working on Vol. 2 (Mithradates II). The SNP aims at a full structural reconstruction of the Parthian coinage. It was accordingly crucial to harmonise the approaches of the different groups working in the framework of the project, exploiting the experience accumulated in the preparation of Vol. 7, which I published in 2012.

In particular, the joint work with the British Museum branch of the SNP has focused on how to define the typological features at the various levels of classification, and how to present them in the reconstruction. This also requires grappling with methodological questions of scale. For example, it had to take into account the specific problems in the analysis of a coinage such as that of Mithradates II, which was produced on an enormous scale: the quantitative basis for SNP 2 is between four and five times larger than that available for SNP 7. 

The main focus of the study has been on the analysis of drachm production, which is the most challenging. The two main phases and the relevant sub-periods defined by the work so far done by the British Museum SNP team have been examined and discussed in detail. A test version of the structural reconstruction has been elaborated for the first phase of production of Mithradates’ drachms (divided into two further sub-periods), which will provide a reference pattern in order to deal with the successive stages of production. Some of the links have already been detected, such as the employment of obverse monograms across the last period of the first phase and the beginning of the second phase. A range of control marks on the reverse has been analyzed, detecting a recurring two-fold pattern, in all likelihood to be connected to the production of the working stations within each mint.

It is expected that the results of the study of the materials covered in SNP 2 may be the object of further joint work between the London and the Viennese branches of the SNP prior to publication.