by Sylviane Estiot & Jérôme Mairat
February 23, 2012 – As preliminary step to the printed revision of the Roman Imperial Coinage V.1, part 2 a new website has gone online. The database presented here applies to the imperial reigns from AD 268 until 276, that is, the reigns of Claudius Gothicus, Quintillus, Aurelian, Tacitus, and Florianus, as well as the coinage of the princes of Palmyra, Vabalathus and Zenobia, issued by the imperial mint of Antioch. Thus, the period covers an important phase in the ‘3rd century crisis’ encountered by the Roman Empire, from the reign which symbolizes its most critical point (Claudius Gothicus) to those which implemented the necessary takeover (Aurelian and his successors).
The documentation assembled here is based chiefly on 12 main institutional collections of reference (Paris, London, Oxford, Vienna, Copenhagen, Milan, Budapest, Munich, Brussels, Cambridge, Berlin, and New York) which have been exhaustively studied and digitized by agreement with their curators. They are hereby warmly thanked, for without them this work could never have been realized.
The database is largely completed by some institutional collections looked at more superficially (Zagreb, Luxembourg, Trier, …); the private collections to which their owners gave us access; the coin hoards, if it is possible to use their publication; the material from sales catalogues, sales online, etc.
In order to be included in the corpus, all coin types must have been checked by direct examination, that is to say, inspected visually or verified by photographs.
The database holds to date more than 4,500 entries (i.e. revised RIC numbers), based on 104,000 coins and more than 80,000 digital photographs.
It is searchable by simple, advanced (through 15 descriptive fields and scroll menus) and iconographic search.
As for this period of inflation and demultiplication in the minting network, it is hard to be exhaustive, we have left open possibilities for feedback and additional information or corrections from the scientific community.
The project has been financed by programmes of the Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS), for which Sylviane Estiot is responsible, PICS (Programme international de coopération scientifique) Nummi et Cimelia, ANR (Agence nationale de la recherche) programme MONetA. We would like to thank warmly the members of the équipe who spent so much time and energy in travelling with us to gather the documentation, Marie-Laure Le Brazidec, Vincent Drost, Philippe Gysen and Pierre Zanchi.
You can visit and consult the new website of Roman Imperial Coinage AD 268-276.