The American Numismatic Society (ANS) is pleased to announce the release of a new web-based research tool: Seleucid Coins Online (SCO) (numismatics.org/sco). As a component of the National Endowment of the Humanities-funded Hellenistic Royal Coinages (HRC) project (see numismatics.org/pocketchange/neh-hrc), SCO aims to provide a comprehensive overview of the coinages struck by the Seleucid kings between ca. 320 BC and 64 BCE, from Seleucus I to Antiochus XIII.
The current version of SCO is based on Seleucid Coins: A Comprehensive Catalogue by Arthur Houghton, Catharine Lorber and Oliver Hoover, published in two parts in 2002 and 2008 by the American Numismatic Society and Classical Numismatic Group, Inc. (CNG). In total, more than 2,491 primary coin types were published in these volumes. Ultimately, SCO will provide wide access to the coins listed in the print volumes of Seleucid Coins.
While the Seleucid coins in the ANS collection (some 5,129 pieces) serve as the core of the searchable catalogue, ultimately links to coins (many of which are unique) in the Bibliothèque nationale de France, the British Museum, the Munzkabinett der Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, and many other public and private collections will be included. SCO will also stand at the cutting edge of the discipline through the inclusion of new coin types and varieties that have been recorded since 2008. SCO will be the only place where researchers can keep track of such new coins comprehensively and the expanding picture of Seleucid economic, political, and art history that they reveal. Frequent updates to the website will permit users to find and learn about new material almost at the rate at which it is discovered, thereby making SCO the most up-to-date catalogue available to students of Seleucid coinage.
In addition, the ANS is pleased to announce that another component of the HRC project, PELLA (numismatics.org/pella), which was launched in 2015, with the aim to provide a comprehensive overview of the coinages of the Argead kings of Macedonia, now includes over 20,000 coins from 11 different institutions. The current version of PELLA focuses on the coinages in the name of Alexander the Great and Philip Arrhidaeus. Cataloguing work on the ANS’s holdings of these coinages—nearly 11,000 examples—was recently completed and linked to PELLA substantially boosting the number of coins available for study on the website.
