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/3830208663http://www.flickr.com/photos/ahala_rome/3830208925A 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/3359501094As 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#C578to214Moving 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/3351476786But 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/3350658563My
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/3831124700This 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/3830214537Museum 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/3831013534Even 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#antiqueLots 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/3830223265http://www.flickr.com/photos/ahala_rome/3831022522Coin 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/3830205241then 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/3831002846and onto gems illustrating the same
http://www.flickr.com/photos/ahala_rome/3831003178which can be compared in adjacent cabinets with more magnificent gems, this one illustrating Augustus-Octavian
http://www.flickr.com/photos/ahala_rome/3831000570and the next cabinet shows a gem-like piece of
glass, the famous Portland Vase
http://www.flickr.com/photos/ahala_rome/3830999954it 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.aspxWonderful 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