Exhibiting coins as economic artefacts: curating historical interpretation in faith and fortune: visualizing the divine on Byzantine and early Islamic coinage (Barber Institute of Fine Arts, Birmingham, November 2013-January 2015)

Faith and Fortune: visualizing he divine on Byzantine and early Islamic coins was an exhibition at the Barber Institute of Fine Arts (October 2013-January 2015). It reflected on ways in which the rise of Islam in the seventh century shaped global political and economic systems, and how the early Islamic government and the Christian Byzantine Empire expressed the religious loyalties of their states visually. The exhibition, however, attempted to move away from traditional approaches to presenting coins, focusing almost exclusively on them as images and political documents. Instead, this exhibition sought to convey a sense of coins as economic artefacts, tightly woven into the day-to-day fabric of ordinary lives in a period of extraordinary change. This article examines how the spatial, textual and temporal intersected in historical theory and exhibition design and suggests that exhibition represents an alternative method both of presenting (and teaching) but also of undertaking research

Money, art, and representation: the powerful and pragmatic faces of medieval coinage

Book synopsis: “Money is a matter of functions four: a medium, a measure, a standard, a store.” But money is always a medium of communication too, whether about price or about political conviction and authority, fealty, desire, or disdain. In a work that spans 4,500 years, 54 experts chart across six volumes how money has made "the world go round" and capture money's complexities in both substance and form. Individual volume editors ensure the cohesion of the whole and, to make it as easy as possible to use, chapter titles are identical across each of the volumes. This gives the choice of reading about a specific period in one of the volumes, or following a theme across history by reading the relevant chapter in each of the six. The six volumes cover: 1 - Antiquity (2500 BCE-500 CE); 2 - Medieval Age (500-1400); 3 - Renaissance (1400-1680); 4 - Age of Enlightenment (1680-1820); 5 - Age of Empire (1820-1920); 6 - Modern Age (1920-present). Themes (and chapter titles) are: Money and its Technologies; Money and its Ideas; Money, Ritual, and Religion; Money and the Everyday; Money, Art, and Representation; Money and its Interpretation; Money and the Issues of the Age

The island frontier: Socotra, Sri Lanka and the shape of commerce in the Late Antique Western Indian Ocean

The islands of Sri Lanka and Socotra c. 200-700 provide a useful comparison, both with each other and with islands in the Late Antique and medieval Mediterranean. Using the analytical framework of frontiers as a comparative tool, this study proposes using the parameters of scale and proximity in order to evaluate where the frontier(s) of an island lay (along the shoreline or within an island space, sometimes both) and the difficulty or ease of controlling them from inside or outside the island. In its results, this analysis allows for change over time, but also establishes the diachronic effect of physical parameters. It offers a new way through the insular dichotomy of isolation versus connectivity and indicates a particularity of Mediterranean islands. This exploratory approach also sheds new light on an embargo established in ancient Socotra, suggesting it to have been a much shorter-lived phenomenon than previously thought

The tale of the Theban Scholastikos, or journeys in a disconnected sea

This article takes the under-used anonymous Roman source, the Tale of the Theban Scholastikos, to argue for a distinct Late Antique phase in the history of the western Indian Ocean. This late third- or fourth-century account of a Roman’s journey to India and eventual return from captivity, has been too easily dismissed as inaccurate or mined for decontextualised details. The present study, by contrast, situates the tale within both its immediate epistolary context and seeks to offer a new interpretation of its global-scale setting. It offers a survey of the regions likely referred to in the text - the Roman Empire, the Aksumite Empire, south India and Sri Lanka -, alongside examination of related textual and archaeological data. The picture presented of these regions is, in turn, situated within the wider framework of a ‘global hierarchy of value’ proposed by Michael Herzfeld in 2004, and applied for the first time to Late Antiquity. What emerges is an initial framing of the western Indian Ocean in Late Antiquity as a space in which long-distance connections continued from earlier centuries, and in some places even thrived, but were systematically devalued, politically and ideologically, with concrete effects for those involved

Indo-Byzantine exchange, 4th to 7th centuries: a global history

This thesis uses Byzantine coins in south India to re-examine pre-Islamic maritime trade between the Mediterranean and south India. Analysis of historiographical trends, key textual sources (the Periplous of the Erythreian Sea and the Christian Topography, Book Eleven), and archaeological evidence from the Red Sea, Aksum, the Persian Gulf and India, alongside the numismatic evidence yields two main methodological and three historical conclusions. Methodologically, the multi-disciplinary tradition of Indo-Roman studies needs to incorporate greater sensitivity to the complexities of different evidence types and engage with wider scholarship on the economic and state structures of the Mediterranean and India. Furthermore, pre-Islamic Indo-Mediterranean trade offers an ideal locus for experimenting with a practical global history, particularly using new technologies to enhance data sharing and access to scholarship. Historically, this thesis concludes: first, that the significance of pre-Islamic trade between the Mediterranean and India was minimal for any of the participating states; second, that this trade should be understood in the context of wider Indian Ocean networks, connecting India, Sri Lanka and southeast Asia; third, that the Persian Gulf rather than the Red Sea probably formed the major meeting point of trade from east and west, but this is not yet demonstrable archaeologically, numismatically or textually

Collections to think with: collecting, scholarship and belonging in the R. E. Hart Collection (Blackburn Museum and Art Gallery)

Blackburn Museum and Art Gallery has a nationally significant coin collection, thanks mainly to two bequests in the early twentieth century. The donation by R. E. Hart, a local industrialist, was made along with all his accompanying notes and books. This collection offers unique insights into the habits and aims of Hart as a numismatist, his wider network and the intellectual community of collecting. Understanding Hart’s processes of acquisition, and his role as a learned society member and customer of major auction houses supplies the outlines of a shared endeavour that, in the early twentieth century, shaped social and personal, as well as economic and cultural identities. Collections and collecting like Hart’s were also fundamental in creating the resources and structures for numismatic study today, offering a reminder of the importance of preserving and understanding inclusive environments of knowledge curation, as well as context for the collections underpinning much current research

Open Access Journals in Humanities and Social Science: a British Academy research project

An investigation on behalf of the British Academy into the effects of Open Access publication requirements on humanities and social sciences research in the UK, with a focus on journal policies and half-life usage

Editorial

Editorial article to accompany a special issue of Al-Masaq on medieval islands