Conveners
S03. GREECE 3. GREEK COIN ICONOGRAPHY IN THE DIGITAL ERA: 3. GREECE 3. GREEK COIN ICONOGRAPHY IN THE DIGITAL ERA
- Vladimir Stolba (Staatliche Museen Zu Berlin, Münzkabinett / Berlin-Brandenburg Academy Of Sciences And Humanities)
Description
Org.: Ulrike Peter, Frédérique Duyrat, chair: Vladimir Stolba
Numismatic iconography is a rapidly evolving research area, which with advent of new technologies also becomes increasingly interdisciplinary. While its potential for the history of the Roman world has long been appreciated, numerous paths are still to be developed in the field of Greek numismatics. Sharing the basic theoretical framework of the 'Bildwissenschaften', Greek coin iconography has, however, its specifics which make mandatory an approach that is different from the one used for Roman or provincial coinage. This has been clearly demonstrated by a range of international conferences on the topic held in Italy, Germany, and Greece over the last decade.
A number of novel approaches and potential new directions in the field that were identified include:
- promoting research on Greek coin iconography;
- implementing a quantitative approach;
- paying attention to multiple contexts (numismatic, historical, archaeological), with a special focus on contemporary Greek art history;
- analysing image choices and the general evolution of coin types and their distributions vis-à-vis their metals and denominations;
- studying the engraver styles on various levels (international, regional, personal); and
- identifying target audiences and the problems of reception, also beyond the scope of Antiquity.
Digital approaches that have become a new and rapidly advancing trend in numismatic research also raise the question of what Linked Open Data, Natural Language Processing, image recognition and the new tools under construction, such as web portals devoted to iconography, can bring to such a topic. The session aims at identifying where this research currently stands, and how and in which directions we should move further. We invite specialists working on Greek coins from different parts of the ancient Greek world, which should offer a broad geographical and chronological perspective from the beginning of this coinage down to the Roman provincial.
This paper explores the potential of new digital tools in the study of numismatic iconography, taking as an example the Corpus Nummorum Portal—which produces iconographic authority data and aims to create a hierarchical, multilingual Thesaurus Iconographicus Nummorum Graecorum (ThING). It focuses on a specific motif present in the Roman provincial coinage of Byzantion that reoccurs on the...
The ARCH project - Ancient Coinage as Related Cultural Heritage - uses Linked Open Data technology to establish, for the first time, an overarching platform for the study, curation, archiving and preservation of the monetary heritage of the ancient world. It is available through a portal where all the types known from the Greek world, from the 7th to the 1st century BC, are made available in a...
Electrum coinages, minted from 640 BCE well into the fifth century, are usually grouped under the amorphous term of “early electrum coinage”. There are publications of a few museum catalogues and specialized collections, but no comprehensive type catalogue exists. The only monograph that offers some sort of typology of the earliest coins was written in 1975 by Liselotte Weidauer (Probleme der...
This paper presents the preliminary results of the ERC Cog RESP project (The Roman Emperor Seen from the Provinces – GA 101002763), which investigates how Roman emperors, Augustus to Diocletian, were represented on visual media in the provinces. The research combines quantitative analysis of coin types in the RESP project database – linked to the RPC online database, with comparative analysis...
