What is on a fifty pence coin? I posed that question to my class of second and third year undergraduates last week as part of a session on numismatics—the study of coinage (fig. 1). Aside from the obvious answer—the Queen—the response was somewhat muted. Eventually, somebody suggested (rightly) that the goddess Britannia might appear on the reverse of the coin, but another student pointed out that this design was replaced in 2008 with a part of the shield of the Royal Arms. Which part? Nobody knew. And what of the rest of the coin? Do you know what it says on the coin? Possibly not, but the inscription on a coin (known as the ‘legend’) contains lots of important information about the authority who has produced it. On a fifty pence piece, the legend reads: ELIZABETH II D.G.REG.F.D. The abbreviations here stand for the Latin phrases DEI GRATIA REGINA FIDEI DEFENSATRIX, so the full inscription means ‘Elizabeth II, by the Grace of God, Queen and Defender of the Faith’. This final title was originally awarded to Henry VIII in 1521 by Pope Leo X, revoked when Henry broke with the Catholic Church, and rewarded by Parliament, but now, the ‘faith’ referred to by the title was the Anglican. Did you know any of that? More importantly, do you care? And this opens up an important question: how closely do we look at the objects we use in everyday life and what do they mean for us?
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| Fig. 1: Closely examining Parthian coins |
This is a crucial issue for historians seeking to explore the ancient world because we have to work out how much significance we should attribute to the material that survives. What do the images on coins from the ancient world tell us about the society that produced the coins? That was this week’s theme in Beyond Mainland Greece, a module that introduces students to the Achaemenid and Seleucid Empires and gives them the chance to engage with evidence from across Asia; for students who usually engage with the ancient world through the lens of Greece and Rome, this offers a valuable opportunity to broaden their horizons.
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| Fig. 2: Cuneiform inscription of Nebuchadrezzar II, c. 570 BC |
This week we were fortunate enough to be able to hold a bonus handling session with Ken Griffin from the Egypt Centre. The Egypt Centre might be primarily a museum of Egyptian objects, but it contains material from across the ancient world and we were able to get our hands on objects from Babylonia and Parthia! I won’t say too much about the nature of a handling session since Christian Knoblauch’s blog from last week covers this topic excellently, but instead want to give you an insight into how the objects we looked at helped students develop their understanding of the course content. Students were able to handle three inscriptions from Mesopotamia written in the cuneiform script, which was used to write several ancient languages, including Akkadian and Old Persian. Cuneiform literally means ‘wedge-shaped’ and the script takes its name from the shape of the signs that made up the script. Students saw three different cuneiform inscriptions and were able to compare different ways in which the script might be written—they were also able to see that some texts are much easier to read than others (compare W952 with W956, figs. 2–3)
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| Fig. 3: Cuneiform inscription of Shalmaneser I, c. 1250 BC |
Perhaps most important, however, were three coins—one from the Seleucid Empire and two from the Parthian Empire. The Seleucid coin (GR83) depicts the god Apollo sitting on the omphalos—a symbol of his oracle at Delphi—and holding a bow; the legend declares that it was produced on the authority of a King Antiochus (fig. 4). We had actually discussed the symbolism of this very design in class the previous day, so students were able to relate what they had learned in class to this object. In particular, they were able to think about the materiality of the coin—several commented that the coin was bigger and heavier than they had expected, while others noted that parts of the design had worn away over time and that the legend, in particular, was difficult to read.
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| Fig. 4: Coin of Antiochus I, c. 270 BC |
All of the students were able to identify the Seleucid coin but the two Parthian coins (LHC2 & LHC10) proved trickier propositions (figs. 5–6). The Parthians emerged from within the Seleucid Empire in the middle of the third century BC, so, while we’ve mentioned them during our course, we haven’t looked at them in any detail—so it was interesting to see how the students responded to this new evidence. They were quick to point out a number of similarities between the Parthian coins and their Seleucid counterpart—for example, the reverse type shows a figure holding a bow while seated on an object. This suggests that the coins were somehow connected, but the portraits on the obverse of the coins are very different—in particular, students contrasted the beard of the figure on LHC2 with the beardlessness of the king on GR83. This, the students argued, suggested that the figure depicted was not Greek.
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| Fig. 5: Silver drachm of Mithridates IV, c. AD 140 |
But they also spotted that the legend on the two Parthian coins was written in Greek—if this coin was not produced by a Greek dynasty, they wondered, why would they write in Greek? And this brings us back full circle to the question I posed earlier about what is written on a fifty pence coin. On one of the coins (LHC2) the Greek inscription is actually nonsensical—the letters are Greek, but they don’t spell out anything meaningful. Why? Well one answer might be that these coins were being used by people who could not read Greek. The Parthians took over much of the Seleucid territory in Asia so they ruled people who were not Greek, but who had been ruled for decades by Greek kings. They were used to seeing Greek on coinage but they didn’t necessarily know what it meant—so, by the time the Parthians came to power, the people they ruled over expected to see Greek writing on coinage. Consequently, even though the letters don’t actually form words, the very fact that they were Greek letters were important in ensuring that the coins were accepted by the people who would use them, both as legal tender and as representations of royalty. So it is crucial that we as historians look closely at the minute details of ancient objects in order to understand as much as we can about ancient societies, but it is worth bearing in mind that we might actually be looking at things more closely than the people who used these objects ever did themselves!
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| Fig. 6: Silver drachm of Mithridates II, c. 100 BC |
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