Congratulations to Professor Andrew Meadows on the award of an ERC Consolidator Grant

CHANGE. The development of the monetary economy of ancient Anatolia, c. 630-30 BC

The CHANGE project will gather, for the first time, the evidence for the development of the monetary economy of ancient Anatolia, from the invention of coinage there in the late 7th century BC to the absorption of the region by Rome c. 30 BC. Using new digital technology, it will organize this evidence to deploy it for the first time to answer major questions concerning the economic history of this region over the longue durée. The project will be built on three pillars.

• First CHANGE will generate a complete overview of the coinages produced by c. 336 cities, 4 empires, 6 kingdoms, and c.50 independent dynasts in this period and region. Delivered with established Linked Open Data technology, and through a collaboration with the Münzkabinett, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin (https://www.smb.museum/en/museums-institutions/muenzkabinett/home.html) and the British Museum (https://www.britishmuseum.org/our-work/departments/coins-and-medals) this framework will amalgamate coins in multiple public collections to create a database of c.50,000 coins.
• Second, CHANGE will assemble a full record of published finds of coins from hoard and excavation contexts across Anatolia. This data will permit a detailed mapping of movement of coinage over time and place, and allow the exploration of monetary behaviour across political and geographical space.
• Third,  CHANGE will assemble a checklist of epigraphic documents attesting to monetary behaviour across ancient Anatolia, which will allow a parallel exploration of monetary behaviour across objects and text.

Upon these pillars will be built a series of interdisciplinary enquiries into the CHANGE in the monetary economy during a formative period of monetary behaviour from the invention of coinage to the arrival of fiduciarity.

CHANGE will build on current initiatives such as the Nomisma (http://nomisma.org/) project to offer a case study of what can be achieved through the marriage of ‘traditional’ research with new methods and tools created by ‘Digital Humanities’. It offers a model for the re-evaluation of the monetary economy of the whole Ancient Mediterranean.

The Mints of Pre-Imperial Anatolia