About 900 Ptolemaic and Seleucid coins from the Netherlands National Numismatic Collection added

Finally, after two years on the back-burner, I have been able to process spreadsheets sent to me by Paul Belien at the National Numismatic Museum of De Nederlandsche Bank. These spreadsheets were of DNB's Seleucid and Ptolemaic coinage, with references to Hoover's Seleucid Coins and Ptolemaic types from Svoronos' 1904 volume, Ta nomismata tou kratous ton Ptolemaion. More than 600 coins from DNB have been added into Seleucid Coins Online and more than 250 have been added to Ptolemaic Coins Online, representing approximately half of DNB's Ptolemaic collection, since only the first half of the Ptolemaic Empire has so far been published to PCO. The DNB is presently the third-largest contributor of Seleucid coins, behind the American Numismatic Society and Bibliotheque nationale de France.

A few Seleucid coins have findspots of Caesarea (in Israel), perhaps from excavations. Interestingly one Ptolemaic coin, CPE 892, a silver stater minted in Alexandria of Ptolemy IV, was found in Arnhem, Netherlands.

DNB 1960-0180, found in Arnhem

Over 1,000 coins from the Gallo-Roman Museum of Tongeren added to OCRE

This is several months late, but in January, more than 1,000 coins from the Gallo-Roman Museum of Tongeren were added to Online Coins of the Roman Empire. A large number of these coins have findspots, which have propagated into the mapping functions through the OCRE user interfaces.

What's particularly notable of this collection joining the Nomisma.org consortium is a successful technical test of the Nomisma RDF import back-end's findspot reconciliation workflow. The technical team at the museum wrote a dynamic transformation into the Nomisma RDF model that conforms to our current CIDOC-CRM inspired findspot structure. Their gazetteer system of choice is Geonames.org, and these Geonames URIs are reconciled to Wikidata.org ones upon ingestion into the Nomisma SPARQL endpoint.

 

An example of Augustus 287 with a findspot of Tongeren, Belgium

 

Although this is not a unique example, since many Iron Age British coins from the British Museum or Portable Antiquities Scheme with findspots have been uploaded into Nomisma and made accessible through Iron Age Coins in Britain, these imported Iron Age datasets were cleaned and normalized by myself in OpenRefine and stored on our web server as static RDF files. The Gallo-Roman Museum of Tongeren is therefore the first external partner to adopt the findspot model through a dynamically generated export, which enabled the testing of Geonames->Wikidata reconciliation upon ingestion.

Many other collections that may have individual findspots associated with coins have not updated their findspot RDF model accordingly.

1,400 British Museum Bactrian and Indo-Greek coins added to BIGR

Simon Glenn has recently completed the cataloging and photography of the collection of Bactrian and Indo-Greek coins in the British Museum (and these updates have propagated to the online collection). This is one of the largest collections of this genre of coins in the world, numbering a little over 1,400 specimens. At present, there are now approximately 5,400 total objects linked to the types and subtypes in the NEH-AHRC funded Bactrian and Indo-Greek Rulers (BIGR) project.

With a concordance spreadsheet of the British Museum's PRN database IDs and BIGR coin type URIs, I was able to use OpenRefine to extract data from the BM's not-publicly-documented JSON API to parse out weights, diameters, axes, image URLs, and even findspots. Although none of these 1,400 coins include a reference to published hoards in the Inventory of Greek Coin Hoards database, about 60 do have findspots listed in the BM metadata. These place names (fewer than ten distinct places in total) were parsed from the BM and reconciled against Wikidata.org entity URIs. The resulting data from OpenRefine were exported into the Nomisma.org RDF model and uploaded into the Nomisma SPARQL endpoint yesterday afternoon. As part of this upload process, the Nomisma import back-end extracted preferred labels, coordinates, and geographic hierarchy for each of the Wikidata findspots linked to the British Museum coins.

Euthydemus I 11.1 with one findspot of Bagram, Afghanistan

Since we extract the geographic hierarchy for findspots from Wikidata and import these places into the Nomisma SPARQL endpoint, it is therefore possible to query all coins found within Afghanistan, regardless of whether the place is Kabul or Bagram. For example:

SELECT ?coin WHERE {
  ?coin nmo:hasFindspot/crm:P7_took_place_at/crm:P89_falls_within+
<http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q889>
}

 

where http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q889 is the entity URI for the country of Afghanistan.

These finds, of course, propagate into the maps on Nomisma.org itself, for example, the page for Euthydemus I now lists individual findspots for Bukhara and Bagram.