Accessible to archaeological experts and students alike, PJ Casey's "Roman Coinage in Britain "is a fascinating investigation of the Roman Empire's economic presence in Britain. Drawing from a wealth of archaeological sources, this book places Roman coinage in its rightful economic and political context to better understand the chronology and lives of those who used it. Boasting over a hundred images of exquisitely preserved coins, many of them life-sized, Casey's study is a must for coin collectors, amateur archaeologists and anyone with an interest in ancient Roman Britain.

This is a new study of the history, archaeology and numismatics of Central Asia, an area of great significance for our understanding of the ancient and early medieval world. This vast, land-locked region, with its extreme continental climate, was a centre of civilization with great metropolises. Its cosmopolitan population followed different religions (Zoroastrianism, Christianity, Buddhism), and traded extensively with China, India, the Middle East, and Europe. The millennium from the overthrow of the first world empire of Achaemenian Persians by Alexander the Great to the arrival of the Arabs and Islam was a period of considerable change and conflict.
The volume focuses on recent investigations in Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan. It provides a complex analysis of the symbiosis between the city life based on oases, and the nomadic peoples grazing their animals in the surrounding semi-deserts. Other topics include the influence of the Greek colonists on military architecture, and the major impact of the Great Kushans on the spread of Buddhism and on the development of the Central Asian metropolis. And although written documents rarely survive, coinage has provided essential evidence for the political and cultural history of the region.
These essays will be of interest to the scholar, the student, and the armchair traveller.

The first two chapters provide a resume of how the coinage of the central Roman state changed, developed and stumbled. In Britain most coins in museums and collections come from hoards (coins deposited in a group) or from coins found singly during excavation or walking over fields. These two classes are very different and are examined separately. The author then looks at how coins were used in Roman Britain, and finally explains the differences between Britain and the rest of the Roman Empire. Despite the need for quantitative as well as well as qualitative analysis, Richard Reece has - for the benefit of those who are understandably put off by reams of statistics - banished all numbers and numerical methods to a single short Appendix. The result is a book sparkling with Dr Reece's characteristically incisive insights that can be appreciated by anyone interested in Britain's past.

The treasure of Buseyra is preserved in the museum of Deir az-Zour in Syria. The coins in the hoard cover a large period from the Sassanian Sovereign Khusro II (590/1-628) until the terminal date 331H/ 941. These coins offer precious information, not only about a large number of mints but about the periods and quantities of minting activity. This treasure is important because it is the first complete hoard of the 10th century discovered in the al-Djazira area. According to Tomas Noonan, the Middle East and Central Asian hoards only amount to ten per cent of the treasures found in northern and eastern Europe and the Nordic countries. In comparing contemporaneous 10th-century silver hoards, and especially the relation between the numbers of coin dies and their representation of their products, we can obtain insights into the flows of money and the balance of payments for each area and each minting city.

This book comprises papers presented at a one-day seminar at the Museum of London, which highlighted change and development in the field of the scientific analysis and conservation of coins. The papers are diverse and reflect a multi-disciplinary approach to the subject.

Minoan sealings are generally treated as historical evidence, shedding light on a long-gone society. The author here treats them from a more art-historical perspective, discussing the internal logic of Minoan and Mycenaean art and the rules applied to the constrcution of am image. She surveys over 100 images, many of bucking animals, and reproduces them in black and white with a detailed catalogue.

The minting of coinage in a territory without previous monetary history or tradition reflects a series of political, social and cultural changes that took place in order to make it possible. Such changes can be traced in the archaeological record thanks to elements apparently as different as coins, ceramics, epigraphy, funerary rites or architecture; these changes thus emerge as some of the most significant points in the colonization process that took place throughout the second century B.C. and at the beginning of the next century in the valley of Cabrera de Mar (ancient Ilduro) and the Laietani territory. This book is exclusively devoted to the mint of Ilduro, its main goal being to study not only the issues produced by the workshop in detail, but also the role that this coinage had in the monetarization of a changing society, that of the Laietani, which had never previously needed to use coinage. To do so, the author of this study endeavours to answer the following questions in as much depth as possible: Who minted the coins? Why? What for? How? Where? When? How many? With the aim of answering the aforementioned questions, this volume has been organized into ten chapters divided in three broader sections dedicated to studying, specifically, each one of the aspects involved in the production of this mint. The chapters considering the location of the workshop and the legends used are fundamental to answer the questions of who minted the coins and where. On the other hand, aspects such as metrology, typology and the technique (metallographic analysis) used by the mint are essential to understand how the coins were minted, and also to put forward a hypothesis as regards the use given to the coin issues discussed in the present study. Finally, the chapters dedicated to the production, classification and chronology of the issues should answer such important questions as when and how much money was put into circulation. This is a book that, in addition to increasing our knowledge of Iberian numismatics, brings us closer to the evolution and production of the coin issues minted in present-day northeastern Spain in general and to the Ilduro workshop in particular.

Money provides a unique and illuminating perspective on the Middle Ages. In much of medieval Europe the central meaning of money was a prescribed unit of precious metal but in practice precious metal did not necessarily change hands and indeed coinage was very often in short supply. Money had economic, institutional, social, and cultural dimensions which developed the legacy of antiquity and set the scene for modern developments including the rise of capitalism and finance as well as a moralized discourse on the proper and improper uses of money. In its many forms - coin, metal, commodity, and concept - money played a central role in shaping the character of medieval society and, in turn, offers a vivid reflection of the distinctive features of medieval civilization. Drawing upon a wealth of visual and textual sources, A Cultural History of Money in the Medieval Age 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.

Bracketed by global financial crises and economic downturns, the modern age has been defined by debates about, and transformations of, money. The period witnessed the consolidation of national currencies and monetary policies as well as the diversification of payment technologies and the proliferation of financial instruments. Throughout, even as it appeared abstracted by finance and depoliticized by expert ideologies, money was revealed again and again to be a powerful medium of cultural imagination and practical inventiveness as well as the site of public and political struggles. Modern money - both as a form of liquidity and as a claim on wealth - remains deeply unsettled, caught between private and public interests and subject to epic struggles over the infrastructures of value creation and circulation and their distributional consequences. Drawing upon a wealth of visual and textual sources, A Cultural History of Money in the Modern Age 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.

This study deals with the iconographic theme of imperial Byzantine 'heavenly coronation', or Andre Grabar's couronnement symbolique, with particular attention to fine arts and numismatics. This theme, along with the rituals of imperial investiture, represents the concept of divine kingship in figurative terms, a significant ideological premise for Byzantine theocracy. The book is structured in seven chapters, investigating both the origination and conclusion of the iconographical subject and its political derivations. It attempts to assemble all the known images of the 'heavenly coronation' theme and to explain its political and iconographical roots.

"Money is a matter of functions four: a medium, a measure, a standard, a store." But money is always a medium of communication too, whether about price or about political conviction and authority, fealty, desire, or disdain. In a work that spans 4,500 years, 54 experts chart across six volumes how money has made "the world go round" and capture money's complexities in both substance and form. Individual volume editors ensure the cohesion of the whole and, to make it as easy as possible to use, chapter titles are identical across each of the volumes. This gives the choice of reading about a specific period in one of the volumes, or following a theme across history by reading the relevant chapter in each of the six. The six volumes cover: 1 - Antiquity (2500 BCE-500 CE); 2 - Medieval Age (500-1400); 3 - Renaissance (1400-1680); 4 - Age of Enlightenment (1680-1820); 5 - Age of Empire (1820-1920); 6 - Modern Age (1920-present). Themes (and chapter titles) are: Money and its Technologies; Money and its Ideas; Money, Ritual, and Religion; Money and the Everyday; Money, Art, and Representation; Money and its Interpretation; Money and the Issues of the Age The total extent of the pack is approximately 1,680 pages. Each volume opens with a Series Preface, an Introduction, and Notes on Contributors and concludes with Notes, Bibliography, and an Index. The Cultural Histories Series A Cultural History of Money is part of The Cultural Histories Series. Titles are available as hardcover sets for libraries needing just one subject or preferring a tangible reference for their shelves or as part of a fully-searchable digital library. The digital product is available to institutions by annual subscription or on perpetual access via www.bloomsburyculturalhistory.com. Individual volumes for academics and researchers interested in specific historical periods are also available in print or digitally via www.bloomsburycollections.com.