ANS launches the first phase of Antigonid Coins Online

After soft-launching last week to give our partners (in the NUMiD consortium, particularly!) a chance to begin cataloging coinage, we are formally announcing the release of Antigonid Coins Online. The first phase of this project includes 182 types of Demetrius Poliorcetes from Edward T. Newell's The Coinages of Demetrius Poliorcetes (1927). We will, in time, introduce typologies for the remaining kings of this Successor dynasty.

At this juncture, it includes more than 300 coins from 11 collections, from both large and small museums. Currently, the handful of coins from the British Museum and Bibliotheque nationale de France are connected to typologies from PELLA that are the same coin type. Karsten Dahmen began cataloging Berlin's coins of Demetrius almost immediately, and a few German university museums soon followed. I updated my script for harvesting Newell references from Harvard Art Museums as well as added another dozen from MFA Boston into the master spreadsheet, which I also reprocessed from a script I had written early. The first coin of Demetrius harvested into Nomisma was actually from the Fralin Museum at the University of Virginia, since I still maintain that project. A further 200 or so were cataloged by Lauren Tomanelli, before she departed the ANS to pursue her archaeology PhD at the University of Arizona, and Peter van Alfen, who referred to the trays for those coins not yet photographed.

Demetrius 159

Additionally, Lauren drew 26 new monograms that are unique (thus far) to the coinage of Demetrius Poliorcetes, while also inserting URIs to monograms from PELLA and PCO into the types, when it is apparent they symbols are semantically identical. These coins now appear in the Hellenistic Royal Coinages union typology, and are available for comparative queries of measurements, geographic distribution, etc. The HRC project was funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities. Antigonid Coins Online was not part of the original set of deliverables for HRC, but as in many of our grant-funded projects, we always exceed expectations.