American Numismatic Society

March 12, 2021, marks the 100th anniversary of the birth of the outstanding historian, epigrapher, and specialist in northern Black Sea numismatics, Pyotr Osipovich Karishkovskiy, who was a corresponding member of the German Archaeological Institute and the American Numismatic Society.

17the century Irish shillings are in the photographer’s queue today. These coins are the aftermath of James II's failed attempt to retain his kingdoms in 1689 after the Glorious Revolution put his daughter Mary and her husband, William of Orange, on the throne.

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A rare object for the ANS collection: a snuffbox. Adorned with gilt copper medallions, this piece commemorates the March 11, 1810 wedding of Napoleon Bonaparte and Archduchess Marie-Louise of Austria. numismatics.org/collection/2019.40.3

In the late 1930’s, Margaret E. Thompson worked as a secretary for T. Leslie Shear, the director of excavations at the Athenian Agora. He quickly realized her potential as a scholar and soon after she arrived in Athens she was assigned to clean, sort, and attribute the numismatic finds from the site. Thompson worked for two terms on the excavations in Athens, from 1937 to 1940 and again from 1947 to 1949. During this same period, Thompson published a number of short articles ...related to the finds from the excavation. These articles came to the attention of Sydney P. Noe, ANS Chief Curator (1947-54), and, in 1949, Noe offered Thompson the position of Assistant Curator of Greek Coins at the Society. Thompson's first major publication as the ANS, completed in 1954, was a catalog of about 37,000 coins from the agora, ranging from the time of Rome to the rise of Venice. In 1961, she published The New Style Silver Coinage of Athens, in which she suggested a chronology of the city's Hellenistic coinage. While Thompson's work was controversial, its significance was also recognized. Thompson served the ANS's Curator of Greek Coins until 1976 and also served as the Society's Chief Curator from 19691979. Her 1973 Inventory of Greek Coin Hoards is still a standard reference today. In addition to her work at the ANS, Thompson was an adjunct professor of art history and archaeology at Columbia University from 1965 to 1978, where she received an honorary doctorate of letters in 1986. She also served as trustee and president of the Archaeological Institute of America from 1965 to 1968 and received the Institute's gold medal for distinguished achievement in 1984. In this photo, Thompson stands with Henry Grunthal in front of the Coinage of the Americas exhibition at the International Numismatic Congress at the ANS Audubon Terrace headquarters in September 1973. #WomensHistoryMonth

It is often said that the marriage of Isabella of Castile and Ferdinand II of Aragon in 1469 created Spain as a unified country. This is, like most historical generalizations, an oversimplification. It is even a historical accident that the crowns of Castile and Aragon remained together, simply because Ferdinand had no surviving son by his second wife.

With its range of hawk-headed and half-mummified deities, the Egyptian pantheon has inspired devotion and intrigue for millennia. Egyptians were drawing, painting, and carving images of their gods well before the first pharaohs, over five thousand years ago. While coined money was not a regular part of the Egyptian economy until the third century BCE, Egyptian religious symbols featured on even the earliest coins. The gods of Egypt and their associated iconographies continued to be seen on the coins of Hellenistic kingdoms and throughout the Roman empire, until as late as the fourth century CE.