This book is not a standard coin catalogue, but it focuses on quantities and percentages of the mysterious 5950 sphere images on Roman coin reverses, and a few Greek coins. This research identifies political, cultural, religious and propaganda trends associated with the coin sphere images, and offers a variety of new findings.

This book is not a standard coin catalogue, but it focuses on quantities and percentages of the mysterious 5950 sphere images on Roman coin reverses, and a few Greek coins. This research identifies political, cultural, religious and propaganda trends associated with the coin sphere images, and offers a variety of new findings.

From Babylon to Columbus and beyond, a journey across millennia and—yes—the globe exploring how we came to understand our spherical planet. The Globe tells the story of humanity’s quest to discover the form of the world: that the Earth is round and not flat. Philosophers in ancient Greece deduced the true shape of the Earth in the fourth century BCE; the Romans passed the knowledge to India, from where it spread to Baghdad and Central Asia. In early medieval Europe, Christians debated the matter, but long before the time of Columbus, the Catholic Church had accepted that Earth is a ball. However, it wasn’t until the seventeenth century that Jesuit missionaries finally convinced the Chinese that their traditional square-earth cosmology was mistaken. An accessible challenge to long-established beliefs about the history of ideas, The Globe shows how the realization that our planet is a sphere deserves to be considered the first great scientific achievement.

Of the twelve Augustae who lived during the fifty years of the so-called “military anarchy” (235-284 A.D.), Ulpia Severina, wife of the “Illyrian” emperor Aurelian (270-275 AD), is certainly one of the most enigmatic and less known. The book focuses on Ulpia Severina, who, even though never mentioned by name in literary sources, has been studied almost exclusively from the perspective of the numerous coins issued in her name and is the subject of many interesting honorific inscriptions that had not been thoroughly examined or adequately valued until this study. This exceptional situation, represented by the sole presence of Ulpia Severina on the throne of Rome, deserves more attention than it has received. The pages of the university history textbooks dedicated to the reconstruction of a fifty-year phase of Roman-imperial history must be, if not rewritten, at least integrated in order to give the deserved space to this empress and, therefore, to the so-called “interregnum,” which lasted at least two months, between the death of Aurelian and the advent of emperor Tacitus.

No people is nameless, and lists of words are as old as writing systems. And yet, both subjects can appear unpromising to historians. This volume shows the contrary by examining the various meanings and functions of ethnonyms in Late Antiquity: added to catalogues of provinces, they reflect the political messages and the regulating power of the imperial bureaucracy; included in schoolbooks, they mirror educational practices and reveal the geographical and ethnic landscapes taught at school; placed on a map, they help make sense of the world in times of transition.

"This publication is issued in conjunction with the exhibition, The Aztec Pantheon and the Art of Empire, on view in the J. Paul Getty Museum at the Getty Villa in Malibu, from March 24 through July 5, 2010"--T.p. verso.