Concept image 
A private collection of historical coinage
The 21st Century Coin Collection
A collection of history, preserved for the future.
Fig. 01 · The threshold. Concept image
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02 · Meaning
A coin is a fragment of history
Fig. 02 · Concept image
Every coin was issued by an authority that wanted to be seen: a ruler, a city, a republic. It carried a face, a claim and a promise of value, and it travelled further than most of the people who held it. What survives is a small, dense record of who governed, what they believed and how people traded.
i.
Who had the right to strike it, and what that right meant.
ii.
The gods, virtues and victories a state chose to declare.
iii.
The roads, ports and markets a coin passed through.
03 · Time
7th c. BCE
Lydia
Pieces of electrum are stamped with a mark of authority. The coin is born.
5th c. BCE
Athens
Silver owls struck from the mines of Laurion carry Athenian trade across the Aegean.
3rd c. BCE
Rome
The denarius is introduced and becomes the backbone of Roman silver coinage.
7th c. CE
Damascus
Under Abd al-Malik, the dinar sets aside images in favour of inscription.
1252
Florence
The gold florin is first struck and becomes a reference coin of European trade.
1284
Venice
The ducat follows, and its gold standard endures for five centuries.
16th c.
Spanish Empire
Silver from the Americas is struck into reales that cross the Atlantic and the Pacific.
21st c.
21C
The collection gathers these fragments and documents them for the century ahead.
Drag or swipe to travel through time
04 · Civilization
Fig. 04 · Rome
Fig. 04b · Concept image. Not an artifact from the collection
Roman coinage was a public medium. New rulers put their portraits into circulation quickly, and reverse designs announced victories, virtues and building projects to people across the provinces who might never see Rome itself.
05 · Journey
Coins moved with grain, wine and oil along the routes of the Mediterranean. Some cargoes never arrived. For archaeologists, a wreck is a sealed moment, and the coins aboard help to date it: a ship cannot have sunk before the latest coin it carried was struck.
Some journeys ended on the seabed. Their record did not.
Fig. 05 · Concept image of a Roman merchant wreck
Fig. 06 · Routes of trade
Fig. 07 · Florence. Inset: concept image of a gold coin
06 · Culture
In Florence and Venice, a coin was a question of reputation. The florin and the ducat were trusted for the consistency of their gold, and merchant and banking networks carried them far beyond Italy.
Florin
1252
Ducat
1284
07 · The Collection
Every record is catalogued by civilization, region and era. Documentation and original photography are added as each piece is recorded.
Placeholder records hold the place of pieces still being documented.
08 · Stories
Short essays on the people, places and ideas behind the coins.
How Roman coins turned the face of power into something ordinary people carried every day.
Why coins recovered from ancient shipwrecks matter so much to the people who study them.
How a gold coin from thirteenth century Florence became a byword for reliability.
Education is part of the collection
09 · Future
21C is being built as a living archive. Every piece is to be documented, photographed and set in its historical context, so the collection can be studied as well as admired.
