CNG 76

CNG 76 is online.

It includes a half Athenian Dekadrachm.

A few years ago CNG started describing the Etrurian 'gorgon' coins as depicting Metus, the personification of Fear. I haven't noticed any other catalogers doing this. I wonder what lead to the change?

In Medusa: Solving the Mystery of the Gorgon, Stephen Wilk theorizes some 'gorgons' might depict Fear and Dread, but he knows of no examples.

... there is no longer anything to buy in New York for 10 cents

San Francisco Chronicle story by Steve Rubenstein on the logistics of transporting a rare coin.

SNG Newcastle remaindered?

Sylloge Nummorum Graecorum Volume XIII: The Collection of the Society of Antiqaries, Newcastle Upon Tyne, $30.

48 B&W plates.

Color images of the coins can be found in the British SNG Database.

hobbyblog

Three weeks ago hobbyblog shut down.

It was the first ancient coin blog with regular content, and an old-timer when I started blogging.

hobbyblog posted one coin per day. The coins were often rare provincials. I visited hobbyblog a few times a week. It was a good blog.

I recently changed blogger templates and my blogroll went away. But hobbyblog was first on that list. The coins are all still there in the archives, there just aren't new posts.

Caron and Tilde

I know my readers are all hungry for information on the typographic symbol for the reverse of a coin. No luck yet.

Unrelated to coins, but today I was reading Known Anomalies in Unicode Character Names. It's a list of the mistakes the worlds smartest experts on alphabets made when writing down the names of the characters.

A note under 'Caron' (inverted hat on some Czech letters) says "The term 'caron' is suspected by some to be an invention of some early standards body, but it has also been claimed by others to have been in use at Linotype before the days of digital typography. Its true origin may be lost in the mists of time." By mists of time, they mean the 1980s! Wikipedia has details.

It reminded me of a similar story, the history of the tilde. The famous squiggle character, ~, which existed for hundreds of years in Spanish to indicate a different n and is on every keyboard, was only born in 1963! It is not much older than I.

Jean Elsen list 241

The catalog for Jean Elsen list 241 arrived in the mail yesterday.

400+ ancient coins, plus many medieval and modern, and numismatic books.

Podcast of Thom Bray interviewing Wayne Sayles

Thom Bray's Pieces of Time has a new 'podcast'. This one features Thom Bray interviewing Wayne Sayles.

The new podcast is 14 minutes long. I listened to it on my computer, but it can be downloaded to an iPod or MP3 player.

Short article on forgery detection by Ilya Prokopov

FORVM has a short article by Ilya Prokopov on detecting fakes struck with modern dies. It is well worth reading.

A brief discussion on FORVM's boards shows what might be a clever fake of a Greek coin detected using the technique.

Coin shortage in Assam

The BBC reported a few weeks ago that millions of Indian coins are being smuggled into neighbouring Bangladesh and turned into razor blades. A new token currency has arisen: “To deal with the coin shortage, some tea gardens in the north-eastern state of Assam have resorted to issuing cardboard coin-slips to their workers. The denomination is marked on these slips and they are used for buying and selling within the gardens.”

(via Marginal Revolution)

I couldn't find any photos of the cardboard 'coin-slips'. They are the same size as the coins they replace.

The USA has taken steps to prevent this from happening here: It's illegal to melt pennies or nickels. It is also illegal for travelers to carry more than 100 nickels out of the country.

Only two days left for bringing Cypriot coins into USA

David Welsh, on UNIDROIT-L, reports that import restrictions are being imposed on Cypriot coins.

The full text is available in The Federal Register v. 72 no. 134.

As of Monday you'll need a valid Cypriot export permit to bring ancient Cypriot coins into the USA. If you were planning on importing anything, spare yourself some trouble and do it this weekend.

Three more BMC Greek titles from Google Book Search

Vol. 16 Ionia, by Head, 1892.

• Preface,
  Contents,
  Coins,
  Indexes,
  Plates.
  

Vol. 17 Troas, Aeolis and Lesbos, by Wroth, 1894.

• Preface,
  Contents,
  Coins,
  Indexes,
  Plates.
  

Vol. 19 Lycia, Pamphylia and Pisidia, by Hill, 1897.

• Preface,
  Contents,
  Coins,
  Indexes,
  Plates.
  

All three volumes can be downloaded as PDF files.

Google now offers a 'view plain text' option that lets you see, as well as cut-and-paste, the OCRed text. (Cutting and pasting seemed to work better if I switched views to 'standard HTML mode', another new feature.) For these particular volumes the OCR is quite poor, probably because of the tables and multi-lingual text.

More )(

The )( symbol is a new obsession of Wayne Homren, who reports in today's e-Sylum that he has contracted the Gutenberg Museum in Mainz, Germany, The Type Museum here in London, the International Printing Museum near Los Angeles, the Museum of Printing in North Andover, MA; the JAARS Museum of the Alphabet in Waxhaw, NC; and the St. Brides Printing Library in London.

No useful replies yet.

In a June 3 comment here, Dr. Robert J. O’Hara pointed to an 18th century list of alchemical symbols, Medicinisch-Chymisch- und Alchemistisches Oraculum (1755), which includes both )( and ℞. Both symbols abbreviate words beginning with RE (Realgar and Recipe). If one needed to abbreviate “reverse” down to a single character to save space it makes sense to use a symbol which had already served that purpose. )( was such a symbol, but would numismatic readers in the 18th century have understood it?

The earliest numismatic use that I know of is from 1758, in a book published in Vienna, Prague, and Triest by Ioannis Thomae Trattner. However, I just haved looked. I don't have any 17th or 18th century books, and Google has scanned only a few. I would be curious to find earlier citations of the symbol. It would be interesting if the symbol started with publishers known for printing alchemical works. I have before never considered a connection between numismatics and alchemy.

It is interesting that the symbol died out. It was used by Eckhel, who is the father of numismatics as a science. It seems logical that authors would want to make the works look more like Eckhel's, so why did the symbol die out? Possibly type setters didn't have the symbol, but perhaps even in the 19th century no one knew the name of the symbol or its exact meaning?

More volumes of Num. Chron. online

I've updated my page devoted to online versions of the Numismatic Chronicle to include recent scanning efforts by the Internet Archive. The Archive has many volumes not available on Google Book Search, including volumes from the first two decades of the 20th century.

Charles Davis sale, July 14th

A catalog from Charles Davis appeared in my mailbox on Friday. 357 literature lots, and 356 are duplicates from the ANA library. The final lot is a charity auction for a Morocco binding of the auction catalog.

The catalog is also available online here. The online catalog seems identical to the printed one, except the page numbers are off-by-one.

Although the lots are duplicates, the ANA has a different meaning of duplicate than I do. For example, they are selling a first edition of BMC Cyprus (1904), with the amazing Autotype plates, but keeping the reprint. This kinda makes sense, as the original is falling apart. Yet if I owned both I'd consider the reprint to be the duplicate.

)( continued

This week's e-Sylum covered my quest to discover the name and origin of the )( symbol. I'd hoped an e-Sylum reader would just know, but none have contacted me yet.

Catalogue of the Greek and Roman Coins in the Numismatic Collection of Yale College, published in 1880 by Tuttle, Morehouse & Taylor of New Haven Connecticut, makes heavy use of the symbol. The Abbreviations section says that )( is an abbreviation for 'reverse.'

This is the only American usage that I know of. No explanation.

The Abbreviations section includes three other symbols, the ligatures for AV, AR, and AE. The AE ligature is well-supported on computers. It has its own code in Unicode.

There are no Unicode characters for the AV and AR ligatures. They are considered typographic concepts, not letter concepts. For numismatics, that might not be true. Authors might want to use the AV and AR symbols to indicate coin metals, but wouldn't want a font that joined 'AR' or 'AV' in the middle of capitalized word.

The Medieval Unicode Font Initiative folks are proposing an AV ligature character. No one is talking about an AR ligature character.

Digital resources for collectors of Ptolemaic bronze coins

Daniel Wolf has launched a new web site, ptolemybronze.com, on Ptolemaic bronze coins. The site is punningly called “The PtolemAE Project”. When used together with special software on the site, and Catherine Lorber's translation of Svoronos, a very useful resource for scholars of Greek Egyptian coinage is provided.

The site has four important components:

• Wolf's own collection of Ptolemaic bronze, with execellent photos and notes. The coins can be viewed by monogram or size.
  
• Catalogs of obverse and reverse types, with photos from CNG and the Wolf collection.
  
• A hypertext paper on the Coinex hoard of Ptolemaic coins
  
• PtolemAE software for identification by Svoronos type

The catalogs of types are well organized. The thumbnails seem small on my 1400x1050 monitor, and I'd recommend larger ones. The only real flaw is that not every type is represented by a CNG or Wolf photograph. The reader is told to look at Svoronos. This text should be replaced by an image from Svoronos.

It's nice to see the Wolf collection pages organized both by monogram and size. (There is also a 'view all' option). The photographs are good. Wolf has descriptive text after each coin, with reference to SNG Copenhagen, Svoronos, and a few other works.

A great improvement to the Wolf collection pages would be to make the references to Svoronos hypertext. It would be wonderful if “Svoronos 1002 (Plate 30 #12)” was done as two links -- one to Svoronos 1002 and the other to plate 30.

The Coinex hypertext looked interesting, both numismatically and as a web site. I am not qualified to review this section, but encourage everyone interested in numismatic web sites or Egyptian coins to check it out.

The PtolemAE software is interesting. It's Java and 1MB in size. The user interface is a form. (There is a picture of it at the bottom of http://www.ptolemybronze.com/). The user chooses obverse type, reverse type, and symbols using Combo boxes. The software responds with Svoronos numbers and sizes for coins matching the user's chosen types and symbols.

The free version on the website shuts itself off after three minutes, but there seem to be no restrictions on using it multiple times, so this isn't a huge problem. There is also a pay version of the software, with additional combo boxes for right-side symbol and countermark, without the time limit. A 'modest' payment is requested for the pay version, but Wolf provides no hints as to the appropriate payment amount.

The software would be much improved if it included photographs of the Svoronos coins in the database, along with Lorber's text, or at least hypertext links to Ed Waddell's Svoronos web site.

The software would also be improved if it was in JavaScript and available on the web without download. However, this might be an expensive and time consuming undertaking, too large for a numismatist without the backing of an institution.

Because Wolf's site is so dependent on Svoronos, I must discuss Ed Waddell's presentation of Svoronos as well. First, I must thank Waddell and Lorber for making this available. Also, I must remind the reader that Waddell's digital version was done in 1999, making it one of the first (if not the very first) numismatic reference work online.

Waddell provides all of Svoronos' plates, but only in low-res. The size may have been appropriate for 640x480 screens in 1999, but is too small today. Although Lorber provides a useful concordance from plate number to Svoronos number, all of the concordances are together. It would be much more useful to put the concordance for each plate with the plate. The concordance itself should hyperlink to both the image plate and text plate.

The 'Text Plates' are a little bit bizarre, even for 1999. The reader would prefer text in his own fonts, text that can be copied to the clipboard. I imagine that Waddell and Lorber chose this format because of the difficulty displaying the various geometric monograms and Greek text in 1999. JPEG versions of the plates, in English, with correct symbols, is still an amazing accomplishment.

Although the linkage between Wolf's web site, his software, and Lorber/Waddell/Svoronos is clumsy, all the pieces are there. Wolf provides a much-needed introduction to Svoronos for the intermediate-level numismatist. His high-resolution color photos represent a significant numismatic publication, for which he deserves much credit.

HJB catalog 155

Harlan J. Berk catalog 155 is now online. 543 ancient coins.

Symbols.com

Symbols.com is a web site based on symbol dictionaries by Carl G. Luingman. Using it, I was able to quickly locate symbols similar to the mystery )( symbol (discussed previously here and here):

http://www.symbols.com/encyclopedia/08/0814.html
http://www.symbols.com/encyclopedia/08/0812.html

Unfortunately, neither symbol has a numismatic connection or name. So I'm stuck again.

Symbols.com's graphic index is an interesting presentation of a query-able symbol dictionary. Such a dictionary would be useful for identifying ancient symbols, such as on coins. I'm imagining augmenting the 'obverse symbol' and 'reverse symbol' field in coin databases by using Luingman's group numbers for mysterious symbols, such as triskeles, ankhs, etc.

Münsterberg

Rudolf Münsterberg published the names of magistrates known to have struck Greek coins. His lists, originally published in 1911, 1912, 1914, and 1927 are still useful today.

I'm working to put his work online: Die Beamtennamen auf den griechischen Münzen (Official Names on Greek Coins).

Although the book is in German, no knowledge of that language is needed, because the book is just lists. For every Greek city whose coins bear the names or abbreviation of a magistrate, Münsterberg gives the magistrate's name and references a coin with this name. Münsterberg's indexes present all known names in alphabetical order.

The book was somewhat difficult to use. When used to identify an otherwise unknown coin, the user must look up the inscription in the index to get the page number for the cities with that name. Then, the name must be looked up for each city. Finally, the citations to actual matching coins must be looked up, often in a BMC volume, an Imhoof-Blumer book, or Mionnet.

Using Münsterberg to research the magistrates for a city wasn't much easier.

Of course, if the name doesn't turn up in the index it might appear in a later update, requiring the reader to check several places before giving up.

My site attempts to correct these problems. First, I have merged the updates with the original coins, something Münsterberg's printers couldn't afford to do. Second, as of today, I've converted the page number references to hyperlinks. When Münsterberg cites a BMC/Imhoof-Blumer/Mionnet, and Google has scanned the work, then my HTML conversion of Münsterberg can take you right there.

An actual database and query language could improve this, but would be time-consuming or expensive to implement. Using hyperlinks is good enough. Further efforts should be directed towards scanning the books lacking in Google rather than trying to improve the query interface.

It would also be useful to translate Münsterberg's remarks into English. If a reader wishes to take on that task I'll give you credits and a banner ad on the page.

Dig in Turkey disrupted by the Occult

http://www.theonion.com/content/node/38680