[First posted in AWOL 16 July 2012, updated 28 March 2014]
Online Coins of the Roman Empire (OCRE)
Online Coins of the Roman Empire (OCRE)
Online Coins of the Roman Empire (OCRE), a joint project of the American Numismatic Society and the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World, at New York University is creating a revolutionary new tool designed to help in the identification, cataloguing, and research of the rich and varied coinage of the Roman Empire. The project will ultimately record every published type of Roman Imperial Coinage from Augustus in 31 BC, until the death of Zeno in AD 491. This will create an easy to use digital corpus, with downloadable catalogue entries, incorporating almost 50,000 types of coins.
To date, more than 15,000 coin types are described, from 30 BC until AD 211, effectively covering the entire High Empire until the death of Septimius Severus.
The current version provides links to examples present in the ANS collection, the Roman Imperial collection of the Münzkabinett of the State Museum of Berlin and the University of Virginia Art Museum. Between these three collections, OCRE is now able to illustrate 50% of the imperial coin types that it contains. Moving forward, as more collections join the project, it will eventually incorporate and display almost all recorded Roman Imperial coin-types.
OCRE also allows users to search in 10 languages other than English, made possible by Nomisma.org's linked open data technologies.
OCRE can now link to another ANS developed resource, Coin Hoards of the Roman Republic. This enables OCRE to draw on findspot data for some early imperial coin types, and map their distribution.
To get started, use one of the Browse, Search or Maps interfaces via the tool bar above.
OCRE is a Numishare tool based on the stable numismatic identities established by the Nomisma project.
