Ptolemaic Monograms Published to PCO

More than 300 monograms pertaining to the coinage of Ptolemy I - IV have been published to Ptolemaic Coins Online. Like the functionality detailed in our publication of monograms in PELLA, the monogram images will appear in the browse and coin type pages, and the landing pages for monograms, e.g., Lorber 265, will show related coin types and a map of associated mints and findspots. Since the American Numismatic Society's collection pulls typological directly from PCO, the monograms will now appear directly in Mantis.

Unlike in PELLA, where more than one monogram does not often occur in the same position on a side of the coin, the combination of monograms, letters, and other symbols may appear together, sometimes in a particular horizontal or vertical alignment.

CPE 1.1 645, for example, includes two monograms arranged vertically in the left field, and lambda over another monogram in the right.

ANS 1944.100.76207 - CPE 1.1 645

In order to handle these particular placements, as well as choices between monograms (a type may include slight variations of a monogram), we have turned to using EpiDoc TEI for more granular annotation. EpiDoc was introduced in 2017 to facilitate increased granularity for legends, descriptions, and bibliographic references. I have recently updated the NUDS XML schema to allow for the namespacing of EpiDoc into the <symbol> element to differentiate between monogram URIs and tei:segs for letters. Many other symbols that appear on coins (e.g., dolphin, torch, lightning bolt, etc.) are still encoded as segs, but we will eventually replace these with URIs representing visual concepts.

The arrangement of symbols above is represented in TEI as:

<symbol position="leftField">
    <tei:div type="edition">
        <tei:ab rend="above">
            <tei:ab>
                <tei:am>
                    <tei:g type="nmo:Monogram" 
    ref="http://numismatics.org/pco/symbol/monogram.lorber.206"
    >Lorber Monogram 206</tei:g>
                </tei:am>
            </tei:ab>
        </tei:ab>
        <tei:ab rend="below">
            <tei:ab>
                <tei:am>
                    <tei:g type="nmo:Monogram" 
    ref="http://numismatics.org/pco/symbol/monogram.lorber.265"
    >Lorber Monogram 265</tei:g>
                </tei:am>
            </tei:ab>
        </tei:ab>
    </tei:div>
</symbol>
<symbol position="rightField">
    <tei:div type="edition">
        <tei:ab rend="above">
            <tei:ab>Λ</tei:ab>
        </tei:ab>
        <tei:ab rend="below">
            <tei:ab>
                <tei:am>
                    <tei:g type="nmo:Monogram" 
    ref="http://numismatics.org/pco/symbol/monogram.lorber.104"
    >Lorber Monogram 104</tei:g>
                </tei:am>
            </tei:ab>
        </tei:ab>
    </tei:div>
</symbol>

The @rend element is used in the <ab> or <seg> for particular renderings, e.g., to annotation rotation.

B544 is an illustration of a choice between two monograms, a variation of sigma that is facing either direction.

<symbol position="exergue">
    <tei:div type="edition">
        <tei:choice>
            <tei:am>
                <tei:g type="nmo:Monogram" 
    ref="http://numismatics.org/pco/symbol/monogram.lorber.250"
    >Lorber Monogram 250</tei:g>
            </tei:am>
            <tei:am>
                <tei:g type="nmo:Monogram" 
ref="http://numismatics.org/pco/symbol/monogram.lorber.118"
>Lorber Monogram 118</tei:g>
            </tei:am>
        </tei:choice>
    </tei:div>
</symbol>

These data are entered into spreadsheet columns following a particular standard, which the CSV-to-NUDS PHP script will parse into TEI XML. The same logic has been applied to the script for publishing Seleucid monograms. So expect to see those online in the year future.