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Author Topic: British Museum, a fresh perspective on their coins  (Read 2906 times)

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Offline Andrew McCabe

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British Museum, a fresh perspective on their coins
« on: August 18, 2009, 07:11:33 am »
I visited the BM in London over the weekend and thought to take a fresh perspective on my usual wander about followed by a riffle through the bookshops. Some of you may have read theses thoughts on another list, but if not I hope you read ahead. Maybe someone hit me on the head on Saturday and said "Andrew, look at the BM as a new visitor would". So I tried. To start with, I took the free tour of the HSBC money gallery (i.e. the coin display) for the first time, and resolved, more or less successfully, to shut my mouth and listen to what the guide had to say rather than presumptively assuming I knew it all. The free tours of the money gallery take place each day at 14:15, except the days when they don't take place, as it depends on willing
volunteers. In finding this out I discovered there are in fact tons of free tours on various specialist subjects available each day. So if the 14:15 look at money isn't on, then maybe the 11:15 Gods and Goddesses of Ancient Britain might interest, or the 11:30 Ancient Greece or the 15:15 Ancient Rome or the 12:30 Enlightenment Gallery might interest you. These and many others are in addition to the paid-for tours, so if you do do something for free then find some other way to spend a bit of money at the museum bearing in mind entrance is free.

Well, keeping my mouth shut for a half hour was well worth while because the tour was led by an elderly scholar whose main interest was the Chinese antiquities collection at the BM and hence his tour was strongly biased by personal interest, covering ancient cash, early Chinese paper money, Hell money for the dead and numerous topics about which I knew little, in addition to the routine masterpieces of Greece and Rome. Of course the BM's EID MAR featured in the display, and the guide had "here's one I prepared earlier" an enlarged photo of that coin as well as many other relevant pieces that he talked about. This is the actual coin he talked about which many of us have seen imaged, but I realised for the very first time that the actual coin is of very whitish silver and not at all like the many photos that darken it down, yet another instance of something I thought I was familiar with being less so.

http://www.britishmuseum.org/explore/highlights/highlight_objects/cm/s/silver_de\
narius_of_marcus_juni.aspx

Whilst in the coin gallery, I took a few photos with my mobile phone, specially of Aes Signatum types that don't feature in my online collection. Whilst many excellent pictures are available on the museum website these cannot be used on personal website (although they can be used in non-commercial paper publications), so I decided to take a few snaps and see how they came out. Some are not at all bad for a mobile phone in a dark room with no flash behind glass. A rather attractive Crawford 7 oval shield bar:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/ahala_rome/3830208409/

A less visually attractive but still complete Crawford 6 tripod bar.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/ahala_rome/3830207629/

A quite complete fish-bone bar, as well as a double-crescent type, a type with a barred A attributed to Tarquinia, and a partial bar that is considered to show the back end of a dolphin. All such bars are very rare if complete:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/ahala_rome/3830210073/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/ahala_rome/3830235383/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/ahala_rome/3830208663
http://www.flickr.com/photos/ahala_rome/3830208925

A rough-cast bronze pancake, that can be compared with a much smoother piece of pie from my own collection that has a Sigma stamp on it

http://www.flickr.com/photos/ahala_rome/3830209583/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/ahala_rome/3359501094

As these are bars that I will not likely ever get to touch I've integrated them with my other photos; on the off-chance that I stumble across a complete oval-shield bar I guess I can delete the BM example. There is some decent discussion by me on this early currency on my website, together with links to the various sets of pictures:

http://andrewmccabe.ancients.info/Catalogues.html#C578to214

Moving on to some implications, I have long been convinced that the following large bar fraction is so carefully made and has such smooth regular surfaces but with apparent marks and indentations that it is very probably an Aes Signatum type, or at least an Italian local issue. Seeing the coins in the BM (for coins these are) made me realise that in size and form it is in fact very close to the double-crescent or barred-A types that I illustrate above.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/ahala_rome/3351476786

But it might even be Roman. A tricky thing is that Crawford has not carefully described the dimensions of such bars, but the above bar fraction is a lot thicker than my only certifiable Aes Signatum, a bull-bull type:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/ahala_rome/3350658563

My bar fraction is certainly worth further exploration and it would be nice to find a perfect match to another Aes Signatum type. I include one new brighter photo below that does seem to have a couple of trunk-like feet (vertical) and a belly (horizontal) suggesting to me perhaps an elephant sow bar,

http://www.flickr.com/photos/ahala_rome/3830323203/

But the side view is frankly more reminiscent of those Italian squat bars, the crescent or barred-A types. Worth more consideration anyway.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/ahala_rome/3831124700

This was by no means the end of my day at the BM. Again, on the hunt for new things or in other words old things I had not looked at before, I was struck with how wonderfully integrated the coin displays are with the other ancient objects, to a far greater extent than in most antiquity museums. Indeed it seems that almost every display case includes ancient coins and if you are specially interested in the Roman Empire then you have a treat in store far beyond the main galleries. A case in point is how coins from the Hoxne hoard were treated, displayed in their original box layout so you can see exactly where the coin part of the hoard was found

http://www.flickr.com/photos/ahala_rome/3830211497/

but then also subject to its own special displays, in this case illustrating where in the Roman empire the coins originated from:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/ahala_rome/3830214537

Museum staff are also keen on you touching the exhibits and there are many cases of ancient objects you can play with under supervision. Most are not so valuable but in the case of the most valuable they have in some cases made exact replicas such as of the Mildenhall treasure that you can play with. Here is a nice picture of my thumb and some plate or other:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/ahala_rome/3831013534

Even the replica induces a sense of wow. I mentioned at the start of this long posting the tours that included the Enlightenment Gallery. That is my favourite room in the BM and as if illustrating the quirky direction these tours can take, the last time I did a free tour of it, it was led by a lady who explained the rise of the blue-stocking movement and 18th century women's liberation efforts as illustrated in the gallery. There is a charming display of coins there also, the favourite picture for me being of King George III's coin trays alongside an open copy of Echkel with explanatory text that explained how Echkel reorganised our view of ancient coinage

http://www.flickr.com/photos/ahala_rome/3831016446/

I comment on Echkel in my review of antiquarian books on my website but it indeed brings it to life to see the book alongside the coins especially when there is a note that one of the gold coins in the picture is an 18th century fantasy-forgery of an aureus of Brutus! (coin on the top right, not that you can see from the picture).

http://andrewmccabe.ancients.info/Coins_History.html#antique

Lots more atmosphere is provided by such items as Consul Smith's books, whose coins were the foundation for the current British Museum collection and thus his library is incredibly important, as well as other coin cabinets and elderly books. The second picture below includes one of the most inept but charming books on ancient coins by Pinkerton:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/ahala_rome/3830223265
http://www.flickr.com/photos/ahala_rome/3831022522

Coin cabinets are luscious items, made beautifully to hold the most valuable and artistic small objects. One of my favourites I photographed a few months back in Amsterdam, that of Rembrandt van Rijn, in his own house in Amsterdam. Rembrandt used coins as inspiration for his classical designs. The open book on top makes it seem all the more vivid.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/ahala_rome/3831183522/

Back to the BM, I mentioned how they integrate coins so well in the display. Here is an example starting with a couple of Roman Republican coin types that I am very familiar with, all the below pictures illustrating Rome's founding Wolf and Twins story

http://www.flickr.com/photos/ahala_rome/3831002256/

moving through coin-related objects such as medals

http://www.flickr.com/photos/ahala_rome/3830205241

then the Capitoline Wolf and Twins statue (NB this is a photo of a poster in the BM, I did not jump to Rome)

http://www.flickr.com/photos/ahala_rome/3831002846

and onto gems illustrating the same

http://www.flickr.com/photos/ahala_rome/3831003178

which can be compared in adjacent cabinets with more magnificent gems, this one illustrating Augustus-Octavian

http://www.flickr.com/photos/ahala_rome/3831000570

and the next cabinet shows a gem-like piece of glass, the famous Portland Vase

http://www.flickr.com/photos/ahala_rome/3830999954

it is a seamless journey from coins to glassware, all part of a single story about the ancient world.

To finalise today's story, I have to draw attention to books available at the British Museum. There is a wonderful, quite stunning small little institution within that is a library which any visitor can access and that houses just about all the standard reference works on ancient coins, the Paul Hamlyn library. I know of no other place on this planet where a complete stranger, not a resident, not registered in anyway, a visiting tourist, can go into a library inside a major museum and ask to consult Roman Republican Coins by Crawford, and be brought the book in 5 minutes and given a nice comfy desk to work at. If visiting London, please bear this in mind as a resource, all your standard works on ancient coins (including, rather deliciously, Roman Coins and their Values – which just goes to illustrate the enlightened British views on collecting) in a museum in the very heart of the city.

http://www.britishmuseum.org/research/libraries_and_archives.aspx

Wonderful wonderful wonderful. The bookshop incidentally has some serious numismatic works for sale including Roman Provincial Coinage Volume 1, on the shelf. Reviews of all these of course can be found on my website:

http://andrewmccabe.ancients.info/

I only touched on the BM in this posting, but it is easy to think that all museums are much of a muchness. They are not. Some are truly great.

Andrew McCabe

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Re: British Museum, a fresh perspective on their coins
« Reply #1 on: August 18, 2009, 07:57:02 am »
I'm lucky in the respect that I work only a ten-minute walk away from the BM and I spend many a lunch break there, as I will again today. I have visited this venue many many times over the years, but I always seem to find something interesting that I've never seen before, and some of the special exhibitions they have in the Great Court are brilliant like last year's Hadrian, and the First Emperor before that. However, during the summer as one can appreciate the galleries do become very crowded, and it is difficult to view, for example, the Vindolanda letters without crouching and getting bumped and buffeted by fellow visitors, as they are placed along the main thoroughfare of that gallery. The Egyptian galleries tend to be the most crowded I think. I like siliquae:  mention the Hoxne hoard and I begin to salivate. The BM is one of those few places where you can go along and admire the artistic works of so many world cultures over the millennia and I do not think it's possible to ever tire of it. :)

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Re: British Museum, a fresh perspective on their coins
« Reply #2 on: August 18, 2009, 09:31:39 am »
Just got back, and although I had originally intended to find out how the Esquiline Treasure had been getting along without me since my last visit yesterday, on this occasion I decided to tag along to a tour of the HSBC Money Gallery. I don't think I had the same guide as you did, but he was good, beginning with the spread of coinage into the West and Iran from Western Turkey and then talking about the development of the coinage of India ... I'm beginning to wonder if the close proximity to the BM is what has kept me in my present job for so long! :laugh:

P.S. I've noticed that they've just closed off one of the Assyrian galleries (it was open yesterday); now there must be at least three galleries closed off to the public.  :( 

Offline Robert_Brenchley

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Re: British Museum, a fresh perspective on their coins
« Reply #3 on: August 18, 2009, 03:56:05 pm »
Some years ago I went on a tour of all the ancient near eastern stuff in the BM, it was excellent.
Robert Brenchley

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