Economic Integration and Disintegration: New Approaches to Standards and Denominations in Ancient Greek Coinage

This study reassesses the evidence for Hellenistic Cycladic numismatic production. In keeping with scholarship on the Cyclades more generally, previous scholars have identified a unified Rhodian iconographic and metrical influence on production and circulation across the entire Cyclades. This paper argues that numismatic production was sub-regionally focussed, and enables us to identify four hitherto unrecognised economic systems.

The question of an ancient state's ability to exclude foreign currency from its territory, let alone its markets, is no small matter. Just how far we are willing to go in crediting an ancient state with these powers reveals our fundamental assumptions about the nature of its sovereignty. This paper urges a more precise deployment of the concept of closure by examining two special monetary zones of the eastern Mediterranean in the mid-second century B.C.E.: the Attalid kingdom of Pergamon and the Seleukid province of Koile-Syria and Phoenicia.

While the Ptolemaic monetary system is often held up as the standard closed monetary zone, little attention has been paid to the functioning and ramifications of this system within the closed monetary zone itself. This paper seeks to shed additional light on the integration of the Ptolemaic kingdom outside of Egypt by examining the production and circulation of Ptolemaic-weight coins in Cyprus and Syria-Phoenicia with particular emphasis on the integration of these outside territories into the monetary trends best understood within Egypt itself.

In this paper I argue that the use of denominations in Greek coinage could be socially embedded and circumscribed and thus question the assumption that denominational systems implied the free convertibility of the denominations in the systems. These insights allow me to explore the socially transformative effects inherent in the economic integration which Greek cities' minting decisions regarding denominations accomplished.

In his seminal 1964 article, "Hoards, small change and the origin of coinage," Colin Kraay argued that "few parts of the Greek world in the sixth and fifth centuries B.C. were equipped with a sufficient range and volume of low value coins to cater to the needs of daily retail trade. Where the denominations existed, they appear in quantity so small that they can have made little impression on the total currency." Nearly fifty years later, new finds have challenged that picture, making it certain that more archaic and classical authorities were in fact producing small change.