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LECTURE: ANCIENT COINS WITH PETER VAN ALFENLiz Benge of Art Institute Chicago writes:"I hope you have been well during these continuing bizarre and difficult times. The silver lining is all the free virtual events and I've watched several of the Money Talks and Long Table ones by the ANS. I'm even giving one of the Long Table talks at the end of this month! Feb. 26. "In any case I wanted to share an event happening March 18 that E-Sylum readers might be interested in. It's a lecture on Ancient coins by Peter van Alfen and I'll give a short intro about the Art Institute coin collections too. Free but registration required."
Readers and Numismatic Bibliomania Society members may remember Liz as Elizabeth Hahn, who was appointed Librarian of the American Numismatic Society in 2008 and served as an NBS Board member from 2011-2013 and Vice-President from 2013-2017. Here's the information on the virtual lecture. -Editor
Join Peter van Alfen, chief curator at the American Numismatic Society, for a discussion on the relationship between political power and coinage with Liz Hahn Benge, collection manager of arts of Africa and arts of the ancient Mediterranean and Byzantium. The words and images that appear on the bills and coins we use today are clearly linked to the powers that issued them. Images of dead presidents and inscriptions like "United States of America" point to the authority of the federal government, and ancillary images, such as the Lincoln Memorial, serve to define our shared heritage as the nation of "We the People." Using coin imagery, or types (in numismatic parlance), to convey these concepts is a practice as old as coinage itself; indeed we don't have to search far among Roman or Greek coins to find types expressly linked to the powers that issued them. It would seem a fair assumption, then, that coins served these purposes from the very beginning, explicitly linking money to political powers. However, as van Alfen will illustrate, drawing on examples from the Art Institute's collection and beyond, this assumption is seriously challenged by the sheer number of coin types, and even nontypes, found among the earliest coins—those struck between approximately 650 and 500 BCE. This evidence defies easy explanation and instead pushes us to reconsider not only the function of early coin types but the easy relationship between these types and archaic political powers.
For more information, or to register, see:
Wayne Homren, Editor The Numismatic Bibliomania Society is a non-profit organization promoting numismatic literature. See our web site at coinbooks.org. To submit items for publication in The E-Sylum, write to the Editor at this address: whomren@gmail.com To subscribe go to: https://my.binhost.com/lists/listinfo/esylum All Rights Reserved. NBS Home Page Contact the NBS webmaster 
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