Author Archive: royalnumsoc

Iron Age and Roman Coin Hoards in Britain

by Roger Bland, Adrian Chadwick, Eleanor Ghey, Colin Haselgrove, David Mattingly, and Adam Rogers

Publication date: 30 April. Available from Oxbow Books at a pre-publication offer of £48.75 (normal price: £65).

Details

More coin hoards have been recorded from Roman Britain than from any other province of the Empire. This comprehensive and lavishly illustrated volume provides a survey of over 3260 hoards of Iron Age and Roman coins found in England and Wales with a detailed analysis and discussion. Theories of hoarding and deposition and examined, national and regional patterns in the landscape settings of coin hoards presented, together with an analysis of those hoards whose findspots were surveyed and of those hoards found in archaeological excavations. It also includes an unprecedented examination of the containers in which coin hoards were buried and the objects found with them. The patterns of hoarding in Britain from the late 2nd century BC to the 5th century AD are discussed. The volume also provides a survey of Britain in the 3rd century AD, as a peak of over 700 hoards are known from the period from AD 253–296. This has been a particular focus of the project which has been a collaborative research project between the University of Leicester and the British Museum funded by the AHRC. The aim has been to understand the reasons behind the burial and non-recovery of these finds. A comprehensive online database (https://finds.org.uk/database) underpins the project, which also undertook a comprehensive GIS analysis of all the hoards and field surveys of a sample of them.

Chapters include

Overview and analysis of the dataset

Theories of Hoarding and Deposition

National and regional patterns in the landscape settings of coin hoards

Analysis of excavated hoards

Coin hoards as archaeological objects: material and context

Coin hoards and society: chronological syntheses

Coin hoards and society: debating the third century: crisis or continuity?

New research into Byzantine and Early Islamic coinage in Syria, Palestine and Egypt, plus their archaeological and historical background. Articles on additional themes include Umayyad weight standards, and the significance of die axes for medieval mints. 

Well over 250 coins are illustrated, many of them for the first time. The book is published by Archetype for the Seventh Century Syrian Numismatic Round Table and contains the papers presented at the Round Table conference held in Worcester in April 2019. The Round Table organises informal conferences for numismatists, archaeologists and historians with an interest in Late Antiquity/Early Islam in Syria/Palestine and the surrounding area. 

2020, vi + 221 pp., illustrated throughout. Price £32. ISBN: 978-1-909492-73-8

For further details contact Tony Goodwin: a.goodwin2@btopenworld.com

CONTENTS

1. Anastasius I at Theopolis – Real or Imagined? Steve Mansfield
2. Using the iconography and inscriptions on Heraclean Dynasty coins to construct an historical narrative of the 7^th century Byzantine Empire. Stephen Maxfield
3. A New Coin Type from the mid-seventh century? Maria Vrij
4. An Overview of the Phase 1 Byzantine-Arab Coinage. Andrew Oddy
5. The Lazy S Workshop: Coin Production in Early Arab Syria. Andrew Oddy
6. A very peculiar group of early Pseudo-Byzantine coins. Tony Goodwin
7. Greek Monograms and Countermarks in Seventh-Century Syria. David Woods             
8. What can we learn from ‘Transitional’ coins? Tony Goodwin
9. Yet again on Justinian II’s gold coinage, ‘Abd al-Malik’s monetary reform, and the ‘War of images’ Federico Montinaro
10. Die Chains and Die Links with the Mint Name Ḥalab. Ingrid Schulze
11. The Standing Caliph Coins with the Mint Name Qūrus (قؤرس) A new Die and a new Die Link. Wolfgang Schulze
12. From Scythopolis to Baysān: A Glimpse at the Coins of The Hebrew University’s Excavations at Beth Shean. Nitzan Amitai-Preiss
13. The Umayyad Coins excavated during the Danish-German Jerash Northwest Quarter Project 2012–2016. Ingrid  and Wolfgang Schulze
14. Coins and Papyri in 6^th/7^th Century Egypt. Tasha Vorderstrasse
15. The weight standard of copper coins as a means for understanding the Syrian tradition of the seventh century. Dietrich Schnädelbach
16. From Ancient to Medieval: The Significance of Fixed Die Axes. Marcus Phillips

Special Publication 57 Tokens: Culture, Connections, Communities by Clare Rowan, Mairi Gkikaki, and Antonino Crisà, Royal Numismatic Society Special Publication no. 57, 248 pages; SBN: 0 901405 35 3.

We are pleased to announce the publication of RNS Special Publication no. 57 – the first volume dedicated to the study of tokens from the Neolithic until the modern age.

This volume examines different tokens from different periods in detail, addressing the makers, users, types and contexts of these objects.

Unpublished material is presented in several of the contributions. This comparative approach reveals the recurring characteristics of tokens across time, as well as their importance to human society.

The entire volume is FREE to download from the RNS website. Follow this link.

Those wishing to own a copy can buy it for £40 from Spink.

Contents:

• Introduction, by Antonino Crisà, Mairi Gkikaki & Clare Rowan
• The Invention of Tokens, by Denise Schmandt-Besserat
• Some Notes on Athenian Bronze Tokens and Bronze Coinage in the Fifth and Fourth Centuries BC, by Kenneth A. Sheedy
• Tokens Inside and Outside Excavation Contexts: Seeking the Origin. Examples of Clay Tokens from the Collections of the Athens Numismatic Museum, by Stamatoula Makrypodi
• The Armour Tokens from the Athenian Agora, by Martin Schafer
• A Rare Clay Token in Context: A Fortunate and Recorded Discovery from the Necropolis of Tindari (Messina, 1896), by Antonino Crisà
• Roman tesserae with Numerals: Some Thoughts on Iconography and Purpose, by Alexa Kuter
• Lead Token Moulds from Rome and Ostia, by Clare Rowan
• Tokens of Antinous from the Roman Province of Egypt, by Denise Wilding
• Tokens in the Athenian Agora in the Third Century AD: Advertising Prestige and Civic Identity in Roman Athens, by Mairi Gkikaki
• Using and Reusing Tokens: Some Remarks About Christian Graffiti on Contorniates, by Cristian Mondello
• The Holme Cultram Abbey Series: English Medieval Tokens and a Cistercian Use Case, by Kate Rennicks
• How Royal Tokens Constituted an Art Medium that Participated in the Monarchical System Between 1610 and 1661, by Sabrina Valin
• For Change and Charity: Identifying the Motivations and Characteristics of Issuers of Tokens in the British Isles in the Mid-Seventeenth Century, by Laura Burnett
• ‘Success to the Seventeen United Bright Stars’: The Spithead Mutiny of 1797 Recorded on a Sailor’s Love Token, by Bridget Millmore
• The Politics of Token Economics, Then and Now, by Bill Maurer
• Index

Special Publication 55 Arab-Sasanian Numismatics and History during the Early Islamic Period in Iran and Iraq: The Johnson Collection of Arab-Sasanian Coins by Hodge Mehdi Malek, Royal Numismatic Society Special Publication no. 55 in two volumes, 832 pages including 130 plates; ISSN 0080 4487; ISBN 0 901405 94 9 

This is the first major work to attempt a comprehensive survey of the Arab-Sasanian silver coinage since Walker’s 1941 Catalogue of the British Museum collection. It includes the latest research on the subject, both historical (chapters 1 to 4) and numismatic (chapter 5 to 15). All the coins (over 1,600), both silver drachms and copper fulus, in the Johnson collection are illustrated on the excellent plates. Where the Johnson collection does not have a specimen of an important coin an example is illustrated from another source, making this a truly important work. 

The extensive chapters on the persons named on the coins, the mints, and the Pahlavi, Arabic and Sogdian legends, make this an invaluable historical source. Other chapters discuss the copper issues with their varied designs, the eras and dates used, metrology, coins struck in the east in Sīstān and further north by the Hephthalites, and countermarks, as well as the designs found on the silver drachms. All Pahlavi and Arabic legends (mints, persons named, religious and other marginal legends, dates) are written out as they appear on the coins in extensive tables. This makes it possible for a beginner in the series to read these sometimes difficult legends.

About the author: The author has been active as a collector and student of Arab-Sasanian coins since 1970. He published a book about the coinage of Tabaristān (RNS SP 39) in 2004 and has written numerous articles about ArabSasanian coins and the related late-Sasanian series. In this work he has brought together his expertise on the coinage, his knowledge of the Persian language and his experience from visiting many of the mint and other places discussed in the book.

For full preview click the link: http://RoyalNumismaticSociety.org/SP55_Preview.pdf

Full retail price: £95 

Special pre-publication price for fellows: £57 plus postage: 
To order click the link: https://numismatics.org.uk/buy-rns-publications/
Special pre-publication offer closed. 

By R. A. Abdy, with P. F. Mittag

Ahead of the launch, later this October, Spink are now taking pre-orders, and can offer a pre-publication price of £135 (the RRP is £150) + P&P.  Pre-order requests should be sent to books@spink.com. All orders will be invoiced once books are received into the warehouse (around the end of October).

The standard reference work for Roman Imperial coinage of Hadrian now occupies a fully revised and greatly expanded standalone volume to cover the last epoch of what many consider the apogee of Roman coinage – begun with Nero’s reform of AD 64 when great effort was taken over their iconographic designs. It is also a long overdue attempt to reconcile our increased 21st century understanding of this otherwise lightly-documented reign of one of the key figures in Roman history. The rich symbolism of the reign is also expressed in prodigious issues of Hadrian’s medallic pieces, many covered in RIC for the first time.

Richard Abdy has been a curator of Roman coins at the British Museum for many years, with particular interest in the middle and later imperial periods of the Roman Empire. He has had long experience of recording Roman coin hoards through work on Treasure cases in England. Since his university research for a corpus of the coinage from the Antonine Wall (dominated by Hadrianic material due the dynamics of coin circulation), the lack of a recent – or even post-war – typological reference for the coinage of Hadrian, AD 117 to AD 138, has been evident to him.

Peter Mittag, Professor für Alte Geschichte at Cologne University, has already published a corpus of the medallions of Hadrian and presents his research in English for the first time.

Roman Imperial Coinage II.3, From AD 117 to AD 138 – Hadrian by R. A. Abdy with P. F. Mittag

Hardback, jacketed; 275 x 215mm; 608pp; ISBN: 978-1-912667-18-5

RRP £150