Marguerite Spoerri

The hoard of Reka Devnia (Bulgaria) was found in 1929 on the site of ancient Marcianopolis. It comprised more than a 100,000 coins, mainly denarii, with some antoniniani and a minority of provincial silver. Issues range from Republican denarii of Mark Antony (32/31 BC) to antoniniani of Trajan Decius (AD 251). 81,096 coins were transferred to two Bulgarian museums and subsequently published by the Bulgarian numismatist N. A. Mouchmov.
A digital dataset, based on the publication of Mouchmov, has now been made available within the Coin Hoards of the Roman Empire project (http://chre.ashmus.ox.ac.uk/hoard/3406). It gives details of entries at type level, providing references to Cohen, used in the original publication, updated RIC references, and web links to online portals presenting standard typologies of republican, imperial or provincial coinages.
This paper will look at the challenges of such an enterprise, from providing updated references for coin types solely known from the brief descriptions given by Mouchmov, to providing links to online portals such as OCRE.

Among Roman provincial coins, the category of the so-called ‘pseudo-autonomous’ coins has long puzzled scholars, as they pose a variety of questions in terms of classification and purpose. The distinctiveness of these coins is that, instead of the traditional imperial portrait that is usually found on the obverse of Roman provincial coins, they show a range of other representations, usually but not exclusively of local character, including deities, heroes, mythical founders or personifications of various political institutions. This paper proposes to investigate more specifically coins issued in the name of the Senate (ΙΕΡΑ or ΘΕΟΣ ΣΥΝΚΛΗΤΟΣ) between AD 238 and 253 and to suggest a tentative interpretation as to why these coins were issued on specific denominations.

A coin without imperial portrait issued by Heraclea Pontica (Bithynia) in the middle of the 3rd century AD was found in funerary context in Kerch (Crimea). Its whereabouts are uncertain, but a cast of it exists in the collection of the Münzkabinett Winterthur. The obverse shows a portrait of Heracles as civic founder and the reverse displays an impressing scene showing Zeus slaying the Giants. Only two specimens of this coin type have ever been recorded and both were found in Kerch in a funerary context, which raises the question of the rituals involved.

Cet article présente l’unique émission monétaire frappée sous Commode à Erétrie entre 180 et 192 ap. J.-C. et propose une nouvelle interprétation iconographique de l'un des revers  sur lequel on voit un buste à trois têtes. Nous pensons en effet pouvoir montrer de manière convaincante qu’il s’agit d’une représentation de la Tychè d’Erétrie, entourée du héros fondateur de la cité, Aiklos, et de son frère Cothos, fondateur de Chalcis.

In Ann Johnston’s recent publication, Greek Imperial Denominations (London 2007), the issues of the Roman colonies of Asia are considered to be the equivalents of Roman denominations: sestertius, dupondius, as and semis. This argument is flawed, as the issues of the different colonies do not fit easily in a common mould resembling the structure of the Roman coinage.
A better approach would be to examine simultaneously all the issues, whether colonial or not, of a given region. In the case of Pisidia, this shows that the coinages of the Roman colonies are similar to those of Greek cities.

"This article examines the production of the coins minted in the province of Asia from 238 to 244.
A detailed analysis of all the obverse dies (based on the recently published RPC volume) shows the extent of die sharing between cities and allows the work of K. Kraft to be brought up to date. The evidence presented here confirms the existence of 8 workshops (9 with «Nicaea») producing obverse as well as reverse dies for a number of cities. These workshops were «Smyrna», «Ephesus», «Akmonia», «Cyzicus», «Pergamum», «Sardis», «Mylasa» and «Aphrodisias». They were organised in various ways. Some of them can be recognised by numerous obverse die-links («Pergamum», «Smyrna», «Ephesus»), others only by stylistic similarities with hardly any links («Cyzicus», «Mylasa», «Aphrodisias»). The workshops were obviously not connected to the administrative boundaries of the province –the conventus– as «Ephesus» supplied cities belonging to two conventus (Ephesus and Miletus) and «Nicaea» cities belonging to two different provinces.
Out of the 73 cities which struck coins from 238 to 244, approximately 50 drew their dies from such a workshop. Some cities (Germe, Hadrianeia, Adramytion, Akrasos, etc.) relied on more than one workshop. Several cities also entrusted local craftsmen with the manufacture of their dies (Lampsacus, Daldis, Kibyra, etc.), others (Tiberiopolis, Germe, etc.) combined the use of locally produced dies with foreign ones. The reasons for this remain largely unclear, though it may be the case that a sudden increase in the volume of a coinage, as in the case for Germè, forced a city to utilize several sources in order to meet a higher demand for dies.
Some workshops encouraged a degree of homogeneity among the coinages of the cities they supplied with dies. This is particularly clear for «Smyrna» where for example almost all the cities minted pseudo-autonomous coins of 25 mm in the name of the Senate and where similar obverse and reverse types were used on coins of the same denomination. This last phenomenon must be seen as the sign of a standardisation of the monetary system, rather than a choice influenced by the iconographical types available at the workshop.
It remains uncertain for the moment whether the workshops were also in charge of the production of the flans and of the minting of the coinage. Some evidence suggests that on occasion, at least, flans might have been produced separately for each city.
The craftsmen responsible for engraving the dies must have had models of the emperor and his wife in order to execute their portraits. Nevertheless each workshop created its own type of portrait, which implies that they did not rely on the same centrally produced imagines. Sometimes however the portraits depicted on the coins do not resemble the rulers at all (Kibyra, Tiberiopolis) or resemble one of a previous emperor (Alexander Severus in the case of Philomelion), which leads us to the assumption that the engraver(s) must have lacked a trustworthy picture of the emperor. A workshop like «Smyrna» has even imposed a stereotype portrait for most of the emperors and the empresses (this is clearly noticeable on the headdress) of the 3rd century, the only way in differentiating them from each other being the name and the titles of the ruler."

This article presents a small collection of additions to the corpus of coins minted in the province of Asia under Gordian III (238-244). Among them is an unpublished medallion celebrating the homonoia between Ephesus and Alexandria in Egypt and representing an elaborate composition of different deities from both cities. Another coin of Ephesus shows a winged goddess whose exact identification remains uncertain.

... | Ayuda. Aperçu de la littèrature consacrèe Ë la mèdaille suisse entre 1972 et 1996. Autores: Marguerite Spoerri; Localización: Schweizer Münzblätter = Gazette Numismatique Suisse, ISSN 0016-5565, Vol. 47, Nº 187, 1997 , pags. 87-91. ...