26-28 June 2025

Coin Legends: Composition, Designs, Lexicography, and Framing Potential

Under the heading “Texts and Images on Greek Coins between Paratextuality and Parapictoriality,” Annette Haug and Ulrike Peter will present initial ideas for Module 4, “Coins as Iconotexts,” based on material from the current first module of ImagNum at an international conference at the Bavarian Academy of Sciences in Munich.

The conference announcement reads: As essential part of coinage, ancient coin legends have received much less attention than the imagery that has been intensively studied by numismatists, historians, archaeologists, and others. While legends have been often used for die studies, that is, from a rather technical point of view, or for solving chronological issues as well as analysis of political key messages, they promise to raise new research questions with The conference announcement states:regard to semantic, aesthetic, and socio-cultural aspects.
Hence, the conference attempts to change this current imbalance in numismatic research by comprehensively examining and contextualizing legends on ancient coins of the wider Mediterranean world. This means that the lexicographical meaning of the legend text as well as its composition, design, and placement on the actual coin type will be focused on. In this regard, the juxtaposition and spatial relationship of legend and imagery and their semantic interdependencies are of special interest, as well as the selection and order of words, their at times apparent ambiguity, or their polyvalency as regards abbreviations.
Based on frames and framing methodology as developed in previous conferences we suppose that coin legends substantially contribute to the “messages” of a respective coin type established as a frame within a complex and dynamic communication process (along with the time) and are thus an inextricable part of the multimodal “medium” with its high framing potential.

The conference is jointly organized by Sven Günther and Hongzia Zhang from the Institute for the History of Ancient Civilizations (IHAC) at Northeast Normal University in Changchun and Elisabeth Günther from the Institute of Classical Archaeology at Heidelberg University.
It is supported by the Thesaurus Linguae Latinae, the Staatliche Münzsammlung München, and the Kommission für Alte Geschichte und Epigraphik.

We are very grateful for the invitation.


 

Author: Ulrike Peter