As the inaugural post for one of the two blogs that the Wulfing site will host, this blog’s subject will henceforth encompass all facets of numismatics and related fields. While the Wulfing Collection contains primarily ancient coins it also possesses coins, tokens, jetons, and medals struck (and occasionally cast) around the world (from their inception to the present day) and it also contains paper currency, stamps, numismatic archives as well as photographs, manuscripts, and so on that relate to numismatics. This blog will not focus on the contents of the collection—that is the purpose of the other blog (“In the Collection”), actually!—but the present blog will instead intersect with numismatics that are both beyond the Collection and yet somehow connect to it. The focus will be on ancient coins but this blog will range over the entirety of numismatics and, occasionally, beyond.
The range of possible subjects in this blog is infinite, and as the Curator of the Collection I have had good cause to muse on that very subject in recent years. In nearly 30 years of collecting, studying, and admiring coins as an academic I have probably looked at well over 1 million coins in person and through photographs and other media. When not fully engaged with my other responsibilities as a professor in the Department of Classics and a scholar of ancient Greek history generally, an average day may witness me looking at as many as 3,000 auction lots or scrutinizing the photographs of thousands of other coins in a single SNG (Sylloge Nummorum Graecorum) volume. When I can be in the vault or looking at someone’s personal collection I might look at another few dozen, or maybe a few hundred. As I write these lines half a dozen coins and other objects sit on my desk, ranging from a pristine U.S. Civil War copper token (Fuld 231/352A) to a silver tetradrakhma of Ptolemy I (Svoronos 368; CPE 235) that hosts a number of countermarks and punchmarks. There is no shortage of the surprises that await a numismatist on a daily basis, no matter how many coins, tokens, jetons, currency, weights, seals, or other objects that one will have the privilege to examine over a lifetime.
But, of course, we train ourselves to learn or, indeed, to memorize intuitively the patterns in the material that we study, enjoy, collect, and so on. Deviations from the most common patterns are what tend to get our attention since by its nature a deviation tells us something about the pattern itself. After all, the discovery of a previously unknown symbol or monogram on a sub-series of coins not otherwise bearing those marks may provide the critical evidence needed to place that larger series at a particular mint or to date it more accurately, as is often enough the case, say, with Hellenistic silver issues. We love to make discoveries and to solve riddles. The Ptolemaic issue noted above was for many decades attributed to Ptolemy II and his mint at Alexandria (c. 285-246 BC) but C. Lorber (in her essential and long-awaited Coins of the Ptolemaic Empire) has now attributed the issue to the latter part of his father’s reign (294-282 BC) and assigned it to a mint on Cyprus that resists conclusive identification but is probably Salamis or Kition.
Lorber’s attribution may solve one riddle or even several, but it may also give rise to new ones even if she is perfectly correct and accurate. Riddles, after all, can arise through our perception that there is something that doesn’t make sense or doesn’t make quite the right sense. When we as scholars shuffle, in effect, attributions between one Ptolemy and another, or between two different city-states, and so on, it is impossible to know what all the implications might be. We hope that we have gotten it right by being as diligent and exacting as possible. But even very well-studied series hold surprises. There is always good reason to go back and examine that things that we think we know solidly, especially as other attributions change and our knowledge or perspective shifts. There is ample benefit also for going back to take a look at what were once the standard publications, now long outmoded or even considered obsolete, so that we can think seriously about how we came to think what we know about some series or about a particular element of just one coin. I for one cannot fail to learn something important by going and reading end-to-end something like P. Franke’s essential 1975 work on the coinage of Epeiros, or J. P. Barron on Samos and J. M. F. May on Abdera (both 1966). That is all the more true, perhaps, with such things as E. T. Newell’s 1923 report on the Andritsaena hoard of Alexander III coins. There is much more to say about the value of intellectual history in the study of numismatics, but the point here is that even standard, commonplace elements of our knowledge deserve serious engagement long after their publication. We will never know everything and we will never be done with the business of scholarship, after all.
Moreover, we tend to be interested in things that are rare or unusual in some or another regard, no less so when it comes to series of objects that are themselves already rare or unusual. There is an interesting tension, I think, between predictability and deviation in the field of numismatics. How we categorize items, or rather information concerning them, and how we then comprehend their interrelationships is a most interesting problem of taxonomy. But taxonomy, I will suggest, largely depends upon difference. Die-studies now serve as the primary mechanism or tool by which we create taxonomies now, but this was not always the case. Studies of coin types and legends long dominated the field of numismatics, and those gave way to serious study of hoards, chronology, archaeological context, and monetary purpose in turn. And we still conduct those kinds of studies and erect various taxonomies all the while mindful of die-studies, and so on and thus add to the layers of knowledge available. But what we tend not to do, of course, is engage in taxonomies that are inherently monotonous—there is not much point, after all, of conducting a die-study of a single coin that is known from only one pair of dies or to simply accumulate an endless list of coins struck by a single pair of dies and then stop at that.
Everything acquires its meaning in a taxonomy because it relates somehow to something else that is unlike it, and it is this difference or differential relationship, if you will, that we are actually hoping to capture in our analysis. The various ways in which we study coins, be they archaeological or metallurgical, be they die-studies or studies of legends, are themselves the intellectual products of differentiation among our methods. Each type or branch of study emerged to relate objects of study to one another in ways that the earlier methods could not fulfill, and it is the growing, evolving universality of those methods, interests, and points of view that in aggregate produces even some small, yet genuine advance in our understanding. We need all of that because even a single coin produced by just one pair of dies remains a significant challenge to conceptualize in all of its complexity.
One further thought in this inaugural post in Numismatics Beyond the Collection concerns the importance of objects that seem, perhaps on first glance, to be highly predictable and therefore perhaps not of great interest. Coins that are common, worn, or simply poorly made—from the engraving of their dies to the striking of their planchets—tend to be passed over by scholars and collectors alike as simply too dull to merit one’s attention. But to do so, however tempting, is often to engage in a kind of intellectual mistake, namely, to assume that what is genuinely important or interesting is that which is merely rare or unusual. Sometimes that assumption is warranted, but not always.
In the next entry to this blog I will take up the idea of looking again at seemingly very familiar coins and apply that to some of the coins of classical Athens.
References:
G. and M. Fuld Patriotic Civil War Tokens, 1861-1865 6th ed. (Stevens Point, WI: 2018)
J. Svoronos Ta Nomismata tou Kratous tôn Ptolemaiôn (Athens: 1904-08)
