Greek Coin Dies

How is money made? What does its production tell us about the relative strength of the states issuing it? In theory, more money should equal more power. After all, you have to pay the soldiers and administrators. You have to pay spies and build harbors. But does it? These questions motivated the Greek Coin Dies (GCD) project. It is an attempt to quantify the production of dies (see below for a definition) across the Greek world in the Archaic and Classical periods (c. 700–338 BCE).

Why ancient Greece? The Archaic and Classical Greek cities were a highly monetized network of states (some democratic, some not) doing business at home and abroad primarily through coined money (as opposed to the many sorts of non-coined money used through history—bullion, cowrie shells, cattle, etc.) Precious metal coinage has its origin in western Anatolia roughly around 560 BCE and it quickly spread through the Greek world. Eventually, such coinage would became a standard store of value for states, roughly up to the time that Nixon severed the dollar's connection to gold in 1971. Even so, this was not the case everywhere at all times: In fact, it is almost certainly the exception in human history. For this reason, the production of precious metal coinage provides a comparative case for other historical moments (16th–18th century Europe, for instance, or "Warring States" China) where similar dynamics were at play.

Ancient historians, and numismatists specifically, have been conducting die studies for more than a century. In such a study, the author takes all known examples of a type of coin from a particular period: This may result in a body of hundreds or thousands of coins (as many as have come down to us, kept in museums or private collections). These scholars "link" the obverse and reverse sides of each coin to one another. Some share an obverse but not a reverse, and some the opposite. A careful study can put these combinations into a relative order, from earliest to latest. Die-linked studies are one of the primary tools for ancient historians in reconstructing the monetary history of ancient states.

Modern databases and visualization tools allow us to use this old bit of scholarship in new ways. Greek Coin Dies (GCD) is a tool for scholars who wish to explore this evidence, visually and across time.

Instructions

Data is stored on GitHub. I will be posting updates there, which will be incorporated into the visualization below on a staggered schedule (the data will almost always be more up to date than the visualization, at least initially).

In the window below you will find the basic user interface for GCD. It is simple at the moment: A map centered on Greece shows bubbles and x's. The bubbles stand for die production over a 25-year period, which can be toggled on or off in the window to the left. Use this to compare one period to another. The x's are places that we know some die production took place (because we have surviving coins from that location that have been dated to that period), but for which lack a die study. Ideally, each of these will be filled in by future scholars: For now, we mark them as we might a treasure map.

A word of warning: There are many, many blank spots here, the result of gaps in our coverage and, sometimes, in scholarship. Well, so be it. This project makes no claim to completeness. It's work is ongoing and is not intended for comprehensive analysis of ancient coin die production. It is better thought of as a tool for comparison and a visual aid for further investigation.

I welcome feedback. Please get in touch with me in the Contact section!