Change on display at the British Museum 24 April - 1 July 2023
Use this URL to see the new entries on the BM collection database.
Countermarked bronze coins minted under Prusias I of Bithynia (c. 228-182 BC) with the head of Apollo and standing figure of Athena-Nike on the reverse.
The Change project team are making good progress with the project to create a complete overview of the coinages produced by about 336 cities, four empires, six kingdoms and around 50 independent dynasts in ancient Anatolia (modern Turkey) using Linked Open Data technology. The project is gathering Greek and other coins in multiple public collections to create a database of approximately 50,000 coins. Change will also put together records of coin finds from hoards and excavation contexts and provide a checklist ofepigraphic documents attesting to monetary behaviour across ancient Anatolia, which will allow a parallel exploration of monetary behaviour across objects and text.
Anatolian Economies
At the British Museum, over 10,000 coins from Anatolia c.630–30BC in the Department of Coins and Medals have been photographed and their database records created or improved. Work on documentation started in November 2021 and was completed in November 2022. The images are now being uploaded to the database and will appear on the British Museum’s Collection Online.
Led by Amelia Dowler, Curator of Greek and Roman coins, British Museum staff have worked closely with the Change project’s centralised bibliography to apply a unified typology, so that it will ultimately be possible tosearch for examples of any given ‘type’ from the British Museum’s collection alongside coins of the same type found in multiple institutions across Europe. For the British Museum, the project will provide increased accessibility of our collection for researchers worldwide.
A new display of coins that were minted in Greek cities across ancient Anatolia between about 630 BC and 30 BC has been mounted in the Money Gallery. The range of shapes and sizes, designs and denominations are evidence for the development of a complex monetary economy in this period.
'CHANGE: The development of the monetary economy of Ancient Anatolia c 630-30 BC' has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (Grant agreement No. 865680).
