The aim of the academy project "Imagines Nummorum: Thesaurus Iconographicus Nummorum Graecorum Online (ThING)" is to unlock the potential of ancient Greek coins for questions of visual studies and cultural history by developing a hierarchical iconographic thesaurus on the basis of Linked Open Data. This dual perspective, which views coins equally as image carriers and historical sources, has a high potential for knowledge that extends far beyond the object of research itself: coins are an ancient image medium that allows image analyses and contextual information to be systematically related to each other in a special way. In this way, central image issues can be related to a historically and spatially defined coin production and use: the relationship between image and meaning, image and image carrier, image and text, image production and image consumption as well as seriality and originality. The project, which is based on the fundamental work of Corpus Nummorum and was initiated by it, is scheduled to run for 25 years (2025-2050).
Four core tasks have been implemented to address the research questions:
- the publication of ancient Greek coins in the Coin Collection of the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, which emphasises the material and object-historical dimension of the study of numismatic iconography,
- the development of a comprehensive image thesaurus, a Greek coin iconography (ThING) with perisitent identifiers and standardized exchange formats, which will allow a context-related evaluation of the coin types for the purpose of a better understanding of the pictorial language and visual communication in antiquity,
- the establishment of a digital structure and the development of AI-supported tools that bring together the various communication and contextual levels of the coin and enable their integration and
- the exemplary evaluation of the collection in relation to central questions of visual history. The material basis for these questions is the imagery repertoire of ancient Greek coins minted from the 7th century BC to the 3rd century AD from Gibraltar across Europe and North Africa to Asia. The image typology of these coins is to be comprehensively documented, analysed and published online for the first time according to FAIR principles. The resulting standardised data and tools will also be usable for other object types of the material heritage.
Our research objectives in detail
Based at the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities. The Academy Project "Imagines Nummorum" is part of the Academies Programme, funded by federal and state governments Akademienprogramms, which serves to preserve, secure and make present our cultural heritage. The programme is coordinated by the Union of German Academies of Sciences and Humanities.
We are finalizing the publication draft and a technical demonstration for our Property Graph Model (v0.9).
Key Focus Areas:
- Formal Description of Compositional Data: Modeling the complex semantic relationships within ancient imagery.
- Quantification of Uncertainty: Implementing a framework for handling ambiguous and fragmentary data in knowledge graphs.
The public release of the core schema and the tech demo is scheduled for January 2026.
