For in person attendees: the Bank of England

For online attendees: we will email you a link before the conference

Jennifer Adam, Megan Gooch and Amelia Dowler introduce the conference and welcome you to our inclusive event

Portraiture on coins offers a fascinating glimpse into the artistic and cultural heritage of ancient India. Coins were an important medium for disseminating power, legitimising rulers, and promoting political and economic stability. From the first century BC onwards, portraiture played a crucial role in conveying the authority and identity of the ruling elite.

The earliest punch-marked coins featured symbols such as animals and abstract motifs. However, after Hellenistic rule began in Bactria and north-western India under the Indo-Greeks, the first true portraits appeared on Indian coins. These coins showcased the ruler’s face, often accompanied by his royal titles in Brahmi or Kharoshthi legends.

The first indigenous rulers to depict their portraits on coins were the Satavahanas of the Deccan. The portraits on their silver coins were executed with remarkable precision, capturing the ruler’s distinctive facial features and headgear.

The Kushan dynasty, which extended its influence across Central Asia and northern India, featured a unique blend of Hellenistic, Persian, and Indian artistic traditions. Their coins showcased a diverse range of portraits, including rulers, deities and mythical figures. The Kushan portraits displayed a fusion of Western and Eastern styles.

Portraiture on coins reached its pinnacle during the Gupta empire. The Gupta portraits exhibited a sense of idealised beauty, with well-defined eyes, eyebrows and noses, reflecting the aesthetic standards of the time. This tradition was followed by the Hunnic rulers of the fifth and sixth centuries.

Royal portraits provide invaluable insights into the attire, hairstyles and jewellery of the period, as well as the evolution of artistic styles and influences. The detailed and intricate portraits seen on these coins serve as a visual record of the rulers' power, authority and cultural milieu, offering a window into the ancient past of India."

The Saecular Games coinage of the rebel emperor Carausius: This talk will incorporate  a summary of Saecular games coinage, the Saecular Games themselves ( described as the the most spectacular religious rites ever seen) and why Carausius might have issued Saecular games coinage. The talk will incorporate themes from the Golden Age myth also seen on the coinage of Carausius and contemporary literature of the day.

We often think of fakes and forgeries as a problem, something to be carefully excluded from collections. But they have amazing potential to allow us to see coins as their original users did: what parts of the design and form had meaning to them? The contemporary forger needed to understand this to pass their product as genuine. What was copied faithfully and what merely hinted at? Did this vary amongst different coins and does this suggest they had different audiences? This paper will introduce the range of imitation, inspiration and straight out forgery then consider these questions, drawing examples from medieval English coinage. It explores a new way to understand how coins were seen by the user rather than the modern or historic specialist.

From Roman emperors to the Royal Mint's 2022 Pride 50p, coins have been used by individuals and institutions to both hide and convey LGBTQ+ identities. Key to our discussion is the life of the emperor Elagabalas, whose gender identity could be considered today as that of a trans woman, was overshadowed by negative portrayals by historians.

Join artist and historian Luna Morgana and curator Aleks Fagelman to explore some of the queer lives celebrated on coinage.

Sponsored by Resonate, Warwick Institute of Engagement

Early medieval Europe can sometimes seem unrecognisably distant: it was the time of saints and prophets, migration and settlement, war and violence, trade and commerce; it was a crucible in which much of the modern world was forged. In this great tumult of people struggling for survival and prosperity, one group often stands out among the rest: the Vikings. Savage raiders and loyal bodyguards, thrifty traders and intrepid explorers; they were all of these and more. Despite holding our imaginations captive for centuries, much detail about how they lived their lives remains a mystery. One aspect of which, their settlement in the British Isles, I aim to explore here through interrogation of numismatic and archaeological evidence.

While there were no coin mints in premillennial Scandinavia, vast quantities of coins from the Muslim world were brought there through trade and readily subsumed into the weight-based economy of the region. Following Scandinavian conquest and settlement of the British Isles, it would be reasonable to assume that the locally minted coins would likewise be subsumed into their bullion economy. However, far from repurposing Insular coins as hacksilver, the new Scandinavian rulers would see minting of local coins rise to levels far in excess of those prior to Scandinavian settlement, ensuring the ready availability of good quality silver coinage throughout the Danelaw. There are two fascinating details to the dynamics of the Danelaw economy: the coins minted there continued to have Christian iconography on them and, according to more recent archaeological evidence, the bullion economy was never abandoned. Many interpretations of what this might suggest about Danelaw society have been offered. However, most end up presenting a society dominated by tensions between the Anglo-Saxons and Scandinavian settlers, something that is utterly unsupported by place-name, linguistic and archaeological evidence. Instead, I argue that through these coins we can get a glimpse at the complex series of social contracts and cultural integrations that would produce a distinctly Anglo-Scandinavian identity."

When Emir Abdur Rahman Khan ascended the throne in the wake of the Second Anglo–Afghan War, he immediately set about consolidating state power. To this end, he established a new manufacturing works outside Kabul, with initial production focusing on two industrial outputs critical to his nascent regime: money and ammunition. These products proved key enablers of the Emir’s soft power and hard power, respectively, and were crucial to his national strategy. The advent of minted coinage in Afghanistan coincided with the introduction of Afghanistan’s first mechanised cartridge-production plant, its first steam engines, its first electricity, and even its first railway. In this paper, the author explores the links between the pioneering industrial production of coinage and ammunition in late-nineteenth-century Afghanistan and identifies the contributions made by these products to Abdur Rahman Khan’s largely successful centralisation of power during a period of significant domestic and international turmoil. 

 The film interweaves the following subjects:

-        The aesthetic nature of coins as things of beauty; 

-        The relationship between ancient coins and contemporary art;

-        The role of money in society (propaganda for Roman emperors);

-        How value is created and retained (Art Reserve Bank project);

-        The movement from physical money to the cyber sphere;

-        How myths of a culture are represented in money and medals.

Contemporary artists tend to be critical of war. The multidisciplinary Czech  artist Ottakar Dusek used the physical form of a coin to symbolise the complex history of his country. He made a medal with a Rouble on the obverse and a German mark on the reverse then shot a high velocity bullet through the ‘coin’. This violent process creates the story and the end result embodies the violence of warfare. My own response is a medal which embodies the waste of warfare by rotating tiny soldiers on a medal.

Including 

• sandwich lunch and refreshments

• a chance to look around the Bank of England Museum, and the special exhibition Pardner Hand: A Caribbean answer to British banking exclusion

• Book swap - bring a book to swap and share your love of numismatics

• GossipGrrrl will be hosting a drop-in workshop throughout the day where participants are invited to collage, draw and paint people (historic and personal) they want to see on coins and notes. These pieces will be collated into a PDF zine after the conference for attendees.

Katarina Lukić Gratian's AE 3 coin

David Pickup New King, Old Coins

Frances Simmons Royal commemoratives

David Guest Finding Matilda

Mary Lannin Women's coin collections

Patricia Smith Parthian numismatics

Arlene Holmes-Henderson Using coins to enliven classroom teaching: tips for getting involved

Who were the people collecting coins on the ground, how did they pass them on to collectors and dealers. Where and how were they getting these coins from? What kind of power relations did this process of collecting include, for example, in colonial contexts? In my paper, I will trace the long chain of hands that the coin passes through from the ground before it reaches a museum or private collection, focusing on those overlooked people and stories that had a major contribution in shaping and building the collections that we work with today in different ways. Looking at the context of colonial India, I will outline how this process was set in the colonial discourse prevalent at the time, so collectors interactions with dealers and agents was tainted with racial prejudice. This will help us understand the role of those figures whose work in the building of a collection was crucial but whose names are often forgotten in publications, museum catalogues and labels. 

It is no secret that the triumviri monetales, the magistrates responsible for producing Roman coinage, sought the opportunity to enhance their public image, and that of their gens, by advertising their mythic origins, their ancestors' achievements, and their own extraordinary actions. A famous example is that of Julius Caesar, who boasted about his descent from Aeneas and Venus on one of his denarii (RRC 458/1). But how else could this ancestral showboating be manifested? Many creative moneyers employed visual puns on their own name that circumvented the need for such explicit divine or familial connections in their self-promotion. Q. Pomponius Musa tied his cognomen to the muses in a series of ten denarii depicting each in turn on the reverse (plus Heracles Musarum), while L. Manlius Torquatus would include a torc in reference to the neck ring torn from a Gaul by his ancestor, Titus Manlius Imperiosus Torquatus. Through an exploration of the punning allusions employed by Republican moneyers, this paper will examine the way in which Roman families displayed their names' etymological origins or homophonous symbols for public recognition and, hopefully, political success. "

The romance of the treasure fleets of the New World has captured people's imaginations for hundreds of years, yet we have relatively few tangible artifacts to link us to these past events. Coins are one of the few enduring items that offer us a direct connection to those exciting times. In this presentation I will look at the context of the Spanish treasure fleets and will share the stories of piracy, disaster and heroism of some coins from my own collection dating from the 17th and 18th centuries, including one or two tall tales along the way.

For in person attendees: optional social afterwards at a nearby café