ROMAN PROVINCIAL COINAGE ONLINE
About this research project
Coin minted at Abydus (north-west Turkey) in AD 177-180, depicting the myth of Hero & Leander.
Roman coinage provides a major resource for historians and archaeologists, both of whom require a reliable standard typology. The Roman Provincial Coinage initiative complements the now complete Roman Imperial Coinage publication series. The aim is to provide a standard treatment of all provincial coinage of the Roman Empire from its beginning in 44 BC to its end in AD 296/7 and to make this freely available online. The website was launched in 2005. It currently includes more than 400,000 coins. Significant redevelopments in recent years, with one new volume added every year since 2014, have transformed the site into the leading reference work on this subject. From its launch the site has also been open to crowdsourced information, allowing members of the public to contribute new data, and has received new material from hundreds of scholars, researchers and collectors from all over the world.
Research aims
In 2024, the project received funding from the John Fell Fund (Oxford) in order to edit, translate, and also encode every coin inscription in EpiDoc, an annotation standard used for ancient texts. An innovative approach consists in using the help of AI in order to complete such a monumental task, as more than 140,000 inscriptions are currently recorded on the database. This initiative does not only benefit a wide scholarly audience, but also considerably enhances public understanding of the material by providing translations of Greek and Latin coin inscriptions that are not necessarily self-explanatory.
Coins are mass-produced objects and as such, from a historical point of view, it is important not to confine consideration to the collection of any one museum. This project is based on the ten most important and accessible collections in the world and on all published material. It represents the first systematic treatment of the civic coinage at the height of the Roman empire, and will have great importance for the study of cultural, religious, political, economic and administrative history at both a local and an imperial level. The site is a vital resource for the international research community. The material is also relevant to a wide range of taught courses and is used not just to discover Roman coinage but also to engage with the complexity of the Roman Empire. The site uses a linked-web approach: when possible, linking the coins to the web page of the museum which owns the actual object, and so encouraging scholars and students to discover related material in museums around the world.
Project start
2005
Project team
Dr Jerome Mairat, Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford
Dr Volker Heuchert, Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford
Dr Marguerite Spoerri Butcher, Ashmolean, University of Oxford
RPC & EpiDoc project (2024/5)
Dr Joe Sheppard, Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford (Research Fellow)
Advisory board and general editors of RPC
Professor Michel Amandry
Dr Andrew Burnett
Professor Chris Howgego
Dr Jerome Mairat
Research Connections
The project is based on the ten most important and accessible collections in the world:
Staatliche Museen, Berlin
Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge
Nationalmuseet, Copenhangen
Hunterian Museum, Glasgow
British Museum, London
Staatliche Münzsammlung, Munich
American Numismatic Society, New York
Ashmolean Museum, Oxford
Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris
Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna
Outputs
Roman Provincial Coinage online resource
