Conveners
S20. GREECE 20. DIGITAL DEVELOPMENTS IN HELLENISTIC ROYAL COINAGES
- Peter van Alfen (American Numismatic Society)
Description
Org. and chair: Peter van Alfen
Between 2015 and 2020, largely with funding provided by the US National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), the American Numismatic Society launched Hellenistic Royal Coinages (HRC, numismatics.org/hrc), a ground-breaking internationally collaborative online research tool with several major component parts: 1) PELLA, which focuses on the coinages of Alexander the Great and his Macedonian predecessors; 2) Seleucid Coins Online; 3) Ptolemaic Coins Online; 4) Antigonid Coins Online; 5) the monograms repository; 6) the digitized notebooks of Edward T. Newell, a major early 20th century American scholar of Hellenistic coinages; and 7) CoinHoards.org, a digitally enhanced hoard database currently based on the 1973 publication Inventory of Greek Coin Hoards. More recently with funding from both the NEH and the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council, an additional component, OXUS-INDUS, is being constructed, which focuses on Hellenistic Graeco-Bactrian and Indo-Greek coinages.
This session will present the origins, design, development, and on-going updates of the HRC project with particular focus on the OXUS-INDUS component, the monograms repository, and CoinHoards.
This paper will discuss the origins, development and future plans for the Hellenistic Royal Coinages digital resource (numismatics.org/hrc) and its component parts, including PELLA, Seleucid Coins Online, Ptolemaic Coins Online, Antigonid Coins Online, and CoinHoards.org.
Over the course of the American Numismatic Society's Hellenistic Royal Coinages project, nearly 3,000 monogram identifiers were created, each with an open access Screen Vector Graphic image that can be reused on the web and in print. These monogram identifiers have been integrated into the online type corpora of PELLA (the coinages struck in the name of Alexander the Great and Philip...
Graeco-Bactrian and Indo-Greek coins are the best, and in many cases only, primary source for our understanding of these enigmatic Hellenistic kingdoms. Since the publication of Osmund Bopearachchi’s seminal 'Monnaies gréco-bactriennes et indo-grecques' in 1991 many new coins have appeared. This paper will present a new typology of these coinages, created as part of the OXUS-INDUS project, and...
Part one of this paper will discuss the nature of typologies used to describe Royal Coinages, both in print and online. In part two it will then outline the work that has taken place as part of the ARCH project, to plug the gaps in the typologies of royal coinages that have not been covered by the Hellenistic Royal Coinages project. In part three it will explain why ARCH has taken the approach...
