Speakers
Description
While scholarship and corpora such as RIC and RPC suggest separate imperial and regional spheres of money recent research stresses the interrelations and interactions between center and periphery in terms of political, economic but also iconographic-cultural exchange. Building on our own studies of the coinage of Edessa and Carrhae which resemble imperial coin types associated with the Parthian campaign of Lucius Verus (Günther 2021) this paper broadens the perspective on the phenomenon and analyzes the iconography of Roman provincial coins for similarities to imperial coin types during the reign of Marcus Aurelius. Based on the analysis of different coin types and insights from machine-learned pattern recognition we argue that similarities ("distances") between imperial and provincial coin types confirm close contacts and exchange between the center and peripheries. This leads us to explore the historical framework and developments of the dissemination of the imperial authority during the long 2nd century AD.
