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Books > Arts & Architecture > Antiques & collectables > Coins, banknotes, medals, seals, numismatics
Studies of seals and sealing practices have traditionally investigated aspects of social, political, economic, and ideological systems in ancient societies throughout the Old World. Previously, scholarship has focused on description and documentation, chronology and dynastic histories, administrative function, iconography, and style. More recent studies have emphasized context, production and use, and increasingly, identity, gender, and the social lives of seals, their users, and the artisans who produced them. Using several methodological and theoretical perspectives, this volume presents up-to-date research on seals that is comparative in scope and focus. The cross-cultural and interdisciplinary approach advances our understanding of the significance of an important class of material culture of the ancient world. The volume will serve as an essential resource for scholars, students, and others interested in glyptic studies, seal production and use, and sealing practices in the Ancient Near East, Egypt, Ancient South Asia and the Aegean during the 4th-2nd Millennia BCE.
So You are hearing alarm bells ringing in the state of Tennessee
Sardis, capital city of the Lydian and Persian kings, stronghold of the Seleukid kings, metropolis of Roman Asia, and episcopal see in the Byzantine period, has been the focus of archaeological research since the early 1900s. This monograph focuses on the over 8,000 coins minted in the Lydian, Hellenistic, Roman, and Byzantine periods that were excavated between 1973 and 2013 in the Harvard-Cornell Expedition. The book places coins within eastern Mediterranean historical, cultural, and economic contexts, in order to better understand the monetized economy of Sardis. It adds important archaeological context to shed light on the uses of coins and the nature of the deposits, with attention paid to the problems of monetary circulation and chronological development of the deposits, especially in the Late Roman period. Statistical analyses, including a new method of analyzing the deposits, help define the nature and chronological horizons of the strata. A catalog of the coins concludes the main body of the study, followed by appendices on countermarks, monograms, and statistical analyses.
The premier form of Roman money since the time of the Second Punic War (218-201 B.C.), coins were vital to the success of Roman state finances, taxation, markets, and commerce beyond the frontiers. Yet until now, the economic and social history of Rome has been written independently of numismatic studies, which detail such technical information as weight standards, mint output, hoards, and finds at archaeological sites. In "Coinage in the Roman Economy, 300 B.C. to A.D. 700, " noted classicist and numismatist Kenneth W. Harl brings together these two fields in the first comprehensive history of how Roman coins were minted and used. Drawing on literary and documentary sources as well as on current methods of metallurgical study and statistical analysis of coins from archaeological sites, Harl presents a sweeping overview of a system of coinage in use for more than a millennium. Challenging much recent scholarship, he emphasizes the important role played by coins in the overseas expansion of the Roman Republic during the second century B.C., in imperial inflationary policies during the third and fourth centuries A.D., and in the dissolution of the Roman Mediterranean order in the seventh century A.D. He also offers the first region-by-region analysis of prices and wages throughout Roman history with reference to the changing buying power of the major circulating denominations. And he shows how the seldom-studied provincial, civic, and imitative coinages were in fact important components of Roman currency. Richly illustrated with photographic reproductions of nearly three hundred specimens, "Coinage in the Roman Economy" offers a significant contribution to Roman economic history. It will be of interest to scholars and students of classical antiquity and the Middle Ages, as well as to professional and amateur numismatists.
This volume continues documenting the well-known excavations at Morgantina, a Greek town in central Sicily, in a presentation of the largest body of coins ever unearthed at an Italian site and published as a group. The excavations, conducted by Princeton University, The University of Illinois, and The University of Virginia between 1955 and 1981, produced nearly 10,000 identifiable coins--most of them at of Sicilian Greek and Roman issues, struck before the end of the first century B.C. The numismatic evidence not only made possible the initial identification fo the side as Morgantina, but has subsequently opened the way to reconstructing the history of early Roman Republican coinage and the bronze coinage of Greek Sicily. The catalogue presents a full list of the coins found at Morgantina through the 1981 season, with discussion of significant issues and illustrations of 679 specimens. A completed corpus and study of the coins struck at Morgantina is also included. Theodore V. Buttrey is Professor Emeritus of Classical Studies at the University of Michigan. Kenan T. Erim is Professor of Classical Archaeology at New York University. Thomas. D. Groves is a graduate student in the Department of Classical Archaeology at Princeton University. R. Ross Holloway is Professor of Classical Archaeology at Brown University. Originally published in 1990. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
The Roman coins found within the area of modern Denmark form the empirical basis of the present study. It is my intention to present and discuss the coins as archaeological artefacts. The provenance and context of the individual coin are regarded as parameters of equal importance for the interpretation of the find as the numismatic evidence inherent in the coin. Initially more weight is put on answering the "how, when and why" regarding the Roman coins in the local context and the import of the Roman coins into the Danish Iron Age cultures, than the how, when and why regarding the export of the coins from the Roman Empire. The latter questions will mostly be touched on in the last part of the book, where I will attempt to compare the evidence from Denmark with finds from other parts of Barbaricum.
Coin folders have a long, distinguished legacy as being most people's first exposure to coin collecting hobby. Everyone either has or knows someone who has been given a coin folder as a child and gone on to fill it with cents, nickels, dimes, or quarters. The state quarter program has been one of the most successful in the U.S. Mint's history. It has brought collecting to the mainstream. Riding on the coat tails of the state quarter program, the America the Beautiful series comes at a time when the public is familiar with searching and saving quarters from circulation. A total of 56 quarters honoring a national site from each U.S. state and territory will be issued from 2010 to 2021.
The invention of coinage in ancient Greece provided an arena in which rival political groups struggled to imprint their views on the world. Here Leslie Kurke analyzes the ideological functions of Greek coinage as one of a number of symbolic practices that arise for the first time in the archaic period. By linking the imagery of metals and coinage to stories about oracles, prostitutes, Eastern tyrants, counterfeiting, retail trade, and games, she traces the rising egalitarian ideology of the polis, as well as the ongoing resistance of an elitist tradition to that development. The argument thus aims to contribute to a Greek "history of ideologies," to chart the ways ideological contestation works through concrete discourses and practices long before the emergence of explicit political theory. To an elitist sensibility, the use of almost pure silver stamped with the state's emblem was a suspicious alternative to the para-political order of gift exchange. It ultimately represented the undesirable encroachment of the public sphere of the egalitarian polis. Kurke re-creates a "language of metals" by analyzing the stories and practices associated with coinage in texts ranging from Herodotus and archaic poetry to Aristotle and Attic inscriptions. She shows that a wide variety of imagery and terms fall into two opposing symbolic domains: the city, representing egalitarian order, and the elite symposium, a kind of anti-city. Exploring the tensions between these domains, Kurke excavates a neglected portion of the Greek cultural "imaginary" in all its specificity and strangeness.
The life cycle of a coin is long. One might even argue that its existence as a coin is only a minor part of the recycling of metal. In the field of archaeology, coin finds are evidence of connections between human beings. Coins were brought from one place to another by someone, with a reason to do so. Any object acquires new properties when moved from one cultural context to another, and the meaning of the Roman coin in the Danish Iron Age context no doubt differed greatly from its original significance. The Roman denarius was meant to be used as a coin in a monetary economy. Having left the area where the denarius was recognized as coin, it assumed new meanings. But, what were those new meanings? How was the denarius perceived in non-Roman communities? Which purposes did the coin serve? This book covers the later part of the Roman coin's existence - its arrival in Bornholm, its use there, and its deposition in and recovery from the soil.
This book collects the most complete, current scholarship on the history of known examples of ancient electrum coinage of the Greek world, with text, catalogue, and images.
Coinage played a central role in the history of the Athenian naval empire of the fifth century BC. It made possible the rise of the empire itself, which was financed through tribute in coinage collected annually from the empire's approximately 200 cities. The empire's downfall was brought about by the wealth in Persian coinage that financed its enemies. This book surveys and illustrates, with nearly 200 examples, the extraordinary variety of silver and gold coinages that were employed in the history of the period, minted by cities within the empire and by those cities and rulers that came into contact with it. It also examines how coins supplement the literary sources and even attest to developments in the monetary history of the period that would otherwise be unknown. This is an accessible introduction to both the history of the Athenian empire and to the use of coins as evidence.
Color versions of select print images available on the Resources tab (or here: www.cambridge.org/heymans). This book shows how money emerged and spread in the eastern Mediterranean, centuries before the invention of coinage. While the invention of coinage in Ancient Lydia around 630 BCE is widely regarded as one of the defining innovations of the ancient world, money itself was never invented. It gained critical weight in the Iron Age (ca. 1200 - 600 BCE) as a social and economic tool, most dominantly in the form of precious metal bullion. This book is the first study to comprehensively engage with the early history of money in the Iron Age Mediterranean, tracing its development in the Levant and the Aegean. Building on a detailed study of precious metal hoards, Elon D. Heymans deploys a wide range of sources, both textual and material, to rethink money's role and origins in the history of the eastern Mediterranean.
The origins of the modern, Western concept of money can be traced back to the earliest electrum coins that were produced in Asia Minor in the seventh century BCE. While other forms of currency (shells, jewelry, silver ingots) were in widespread use long before this, the introduction of coinage aided and accelerated momentous economic, political, and social developments such as long-distance trade, wealth creation (and the social differentiation that followed from that), and the financing of military and political power. Coinage, though adopted inconsistently across different ancient societies, became a significant marker of identity and became embedded in practices of religion and superstition. And this period also witnessed the emergence of the problems of money - inflation, monetary instability, and the breakup of monetary unions - which have surfaced repeatedly in succeeding centuries. Drawing upon a wealth of visual and textual sources, A Cultural History of Money in Antiquity presents essays that examine key cultural case studies of the period on the themes of technologies, ideas, ritual and religion, the everyday, art and representation, interpretation, and the issues of the age.
The Enlightenment was a time of monetary turmoil and transformation in Europe. Change began with a riot of experimentation, including novel ideas about human agency and capacity to promote economic progress, efforts to reframe divinity in terms (like the providential) compatible with market exchange, new instruments of credit, and innovative institutions such as national banks and capital markets. Europeans, including the settler societies in North America, improvised frantically: people faced the task of everyday exchange in changing media; governments took up the project of creating currencies that supported their political power; artists and writers raced to represent new forms of wealth and interpret the issues they raised; and intellectuals struggled to conceptualize, and tame, patterns of monetary transformation. The result was a rich debate, still unsettled, about the sources of value, the morality of the market, and the very nature of money. Drawing upon a wealth of visual and textual sources, A Cultural History of Money in the Age of Enlightenment presents essays that examine key cultural case studies of the period on the themes of technologies, ideas, ritual and religion, the everyday, art and representation, interpretation, and the issues of the age.
The Stephen K. and Janie Woo Scher Collection of portrait medals is unparalleled among those in private hands. Noted for its comprehensiveness and outstanding quality, it includes medals dating from the fifteenth to the nineteenth centuries. This new volume, the result of a the Schers' gift of 450 medals to The Frick Collection in 2016, brings to life these masterpieces of small-scale sculpture, conveying the circumstances of their creation and their historic significance. Beginning in the Italian Renaissance, medals were made to commemorate individuals and to acknowledge specific events or milestones, such as marriages, deaths, coronations, and military victories. They were precious, portable, and popular among the wealthy and powerful. This book provides a concise, fascinating introduction to their artistry.
This volume of Medieval European Coinage is the first English-language survey to bring the latest research on the coinage of Spain and Portugal c.1000-1500 to an international audience. A major work of reference by leading numismatic experts, the volume provides an authoritative and up-to-date account of the coinages of Aragon, Catalonia, Castile, Leon, Navarre and Portugal, which have rarely been studied together. It considers how money circulated throughout the peninsula, offering new syntheses of the monetary history of the individual kingdoms and includes an extensive catalogue of the Aragonese, Castilian, Catalan, Leonese, Navarrese and Portuguese coins in the collection of the Fitzwilliam Museum. This major contribution to the field will be a valuable point of reference for the study of medieval history, numismatics and archaeology.
In volume 2 of this series, Part I examines Phocas and Heraclius (602-641) and Part II covers the period between Heraclius Constantine to Theodosius III (602-717).
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