New Portal on Coins of the Ostrogoths

Note: this is reposted from https://ikmk.smb.museum/news?lang=de&news_id=119&news_lang=en

 The Münzkabinett Berlin and its partner institutions in Germany, Europe and the United States are pleased to announce the launch of a new digital type catalogue for the coinage of Ostrogoths in Italy in the 6th century.

The establishment of this online catalogue was funded by the Federal Program of the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation and comes with the kind permission of Spink Books in London and the authors of the printed corpus [Michael Andreas Metlich, The Coinage of Ostrogothic Italy and a stamp study by Theodahad Folles by M. A. Metlich and E. A. Arslan (London 2004)].

The digital type catalogue allows for the first time a freely available presentation of the coins of the migration period kingdom of the Ostrogoths in Italy, which are scattered across German and international museums. In addition to ikmk.net's partner institutions in Germany, Austria and Switzerland, there is the American Numismatic Society (which also operates and maintains the servers) and the collection of the British Museum in London. Other collections can assign their holdings using the type links provided here and import them via an API interface.

Of particular importance is the new ability of now authorizing smaller and regional collections (in particular cooperation partners of the Coin Cabinet of the State Museums and members of the IKMK family) to be able to present their own holdings to an international audience here.

The website allows for the use of various search filters, map and object views.

The homepage is written in German and English, the individual type descriptions are in English using standardized concepts from nomisma.org with individual languages represented.

Links

• Online Coinage of Ostrogothic Italy
• OCOI Typ 7 a
• Föderales Programm der SPK
• Federal Program of the Foundation Prussian Heritage (SPK)
• ikmk.net
• American Numismatic Society
• Spink Books
• NomismaHypotheses
• Pressemitteilung SPK

 

 

Coin Hoards of the Roman Empire joins the Linked Open Data cloud

In a significant enhancement to the study of Roman imperial coinage, nearly 5,000 coin hoards from the Oxford Coin Hoards of the Roman Empire project have been integrated into the numismatic Linked Open Data and are accessible in Online Coins of the Roman Empire. Nearly 5,000 coin hoards have been uploaded into Nomisma's SPARQL endpoint linking to about 14,000 Roman imperial coin types. This represents nearly one-third of all hoards in the database; the only hoards integrated into the LOD cloud are those with at least one OCRE URI, although it would be possible to upload all hoards in the future, with references to Nomisma URIs for authorities, denominations, etc.

Many CHRE hoards include geographic coordinates linking to the known findspot place name, although these places had not been coreferenced to URIs in a gazetteer system, such as Geonames. Prior to tranforming the CHRE export into RDF, I used OpenRefine to interact with Geonames APIs to link to the lowest-level geographic entity referenced by the CHRE record, whether it is a city, region, or country. A handful of places do not have Geonames URIs, but link to Wikidata.org instead. Upon uploading the RDF data into Nomisma.org, the Geonames URIs were linked to Wikidata, and the geographic hierarchy for findspots was also extracted from Wikidata and uploaded to Nomisma. It is therefore possible to query all hoards found within Greece by querying based on the Wikidata or Geonames URI for Greece, regardless of the source dataset. This enables more complex queries across datasets, such as denarius hoards of the late Roman Republic and early Principate, combining the hoards of Coin Hoards of the Roman Republic and Coin Hoards of the Roman Empire. 

In addition to significantly enhancing the geographic distribution maps depicted on the coin type pages in OCRE, the distribution maps of related Roman imperial numismatic concepts on Nomisma will also show a large number of hoards. It should also be noted that single finds of gold coins are recorded in the database, and so the geographic distribution of aurei and solidi are greatly improved.

The distribution of the coinage of Hadrian, from Hadrian's Wall to India

The distribution of Augustus 206, an aureus

Once ingested, the Nomisma-backend will extract the geographic hierarchy from Wikidata, making it possible to query for all hoards found within Romania, for example:

 

SELECT * WHERE {
  ?hoard a nmo:Hoard ;
           nmo:hasFindspot/crm:P7_took_place_at/crm:P89_falls_within ?findspot .
  ?findspot crm:P89_falls_within+ <http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q218> ;
            rdfs:label ?label
}

Many thanks to Marguerite Spoerri Butcher for providing the export from CHRE.

Excavation coins added to Levantine Coins Online

About 60 coins with findspots in Israel (50 of which are from excavations) have been added into Levantine Coins Online. The excavation coins are from KAMAT (Staff Officer for Archaeology – Civil Administration of Judea and Samaria) and the Israel Antiquities Authority, and the remaining coins are from private collections.

Yehud type 24 has the largest representation of physical specimens, with a handful from excavations.

Yehud 24 with findspots

The findspots have also propagated into the broader numismatic network graph in Nomisma.org, with findspots visible in the maps of individual concepts relating to Yehud coinage.

Distribution of finds of Yehud Medinata