Money, Warfare and Power in the Ancient World offers twelve papers analysing the processes, consequences and problems involved in the monetization of warfare and its connection to political power in antiquity. The contributions explore not only how powerful men and states used money and coinage to achieve their aims, but how these aims and methods had often already been shaped by the medium of coined money – typically with unintended consequences. These complex relationships between money, warfare and political power – both personal and collective – are explored across different cultures and socio-political systems around the ancient Mediterranean, ranging from Pharaonic Egypt to Late Antique Europe. This volume is also a tribute to the life and impact of Professor Matthew Trundle, an inspiring teacher and scholar, who was devoted to promoting the discipline of Classics in New Zealand and beyond. At the time of his death, he was writing a book on the wider importance of money in the Greek world. A central piece of this research is incorporated into this volume, completed by one of his former students, Christopher De Lisle. Additionally, Trundle had situated himself at the centre of a wide-ranging conversation on the nature of money and power in antiquity. The contributions of scholars of ancient monetization in this volume bring together many of the threads of those conversions, further advancing a field which Matthew Trundle had worked so tirelessly to promote.

Money, Warfare and Power in the Ancient World offers twelve papers analysing the processes, consequences and problems involved in the monetization of warfare and its connection to political power in antiquity. The contributions explore not only how powerful men and states used money and coinage to achieve their aims, but how these aims and methods had often already been shaped by the medium of coined money – typically with unintended consequences. These complex relationships between money, warfare and political power – both personal and collective – are explored across different cultures and socio-political systems around the ancient Mediterranean, ranging from Pharaonic Egypt to Late Antique Europe. This volume is also a tribute to the life and impact of Professor Matthew Trundle, an inspiring teacher and scholar, who was devoted to promoting the discipline of Classics in New Zealand and beyond. At the time of his death, he was writing a book on the wider importance of money in the Greek world. A central piece of this research is incorporated into this volume, completed by one of his former students, Christopher De Lisle. Additionally, Trundle had situated himself at the centre of a wide-ranging conversation on the nature of money and power in antiquity. The contributions of scholars of ancient monetization in this volume bring together many of the threads of those conversions, further advancing a field which Matthew Trundle had worked so tirelessly to promote.

Like other volumes in this series, Ancient History from Coins demystifies a specialism, introducing students (from first year upwards) to the techniques, methods, problems and advantages of using coins to do ancient history. Coins are a fertile source of information for the ancient historian; yet too often historians are uneasy about using them as evidence because of the special problems attaching to their interpretation. The world of numismatics is not always easy for the non-specialist to penetrate or understand with confidence. Dr Howgego describes and anlyses the main contributions the study of coins can make to ancient history, showing shows through numerous examples how the character, patterns and behaviour of coinage bear on major historical themes. Topics range from state finance and economic policy to imperial domination and political propaganda through coins types. The period covered by the book is from the invention of coinage (ca 600BC) to AD 400.

A comprehensive analysis of the impact of money on the economy, society and culture of the Greek and Roman worlds.

Most people have some idea what Greeks and Romans coins looked like, but few know how complex Greek and Roman monetary systems eventually became. The contributors to this volume are numismatists, ancient historians, and economists intent on investigating how these systems worked and how they both did and did not resemble a modern monetary system. Why did people first start using coins? How did Greeks and Romans make payments, large or small? What does money mean in Greek tragedy? Was the Roman Empire an integrated economic system? This volume can serve as an introduction to such questions, but it also offers the specialist the results of original research.

The origins of the modern, Western concept of money can be traced back to the earliest electrum coins that were produced in Asia Minor in the seventh century BCE. While other forms of currency (shells, jewelry, silver ingots) were in widespread use long before this, the introduction of coinage aided and accelerated momentous economic, political, and social developments such as long-distance trade, wealth creation (and the social differentiation that followed from that), and the financing of military and political power. Coinage, though adopted inconsistently across different ancient societies, became a significant marker of identity and became embedded in practices of religion and superstition. And this period also witnessed the emergence of the problems of money - inflation, monetary instability, and the breakup of monetary unions - which have surfaced repeatedly in succeeding centuries. Drawing upon a wealth of visual and textual sources, A Cultural History of Money in Antiquity presents essays that examine key cultural case studies of the period on the themes of technologies, ideas, ritual and religion, the everyday, art and representation, interpretation, and the issues of the age.

This volume forms the proceedings of the Fifth Annual Symposium of the Assyrian and Babylonian Intellectual Heritage Project held in Innsbruck in 2002. Twenty-nine specialist contributions focus on the economic aspects of the `diffusion and transformation of the cultural heritage of the ancient Near East'. Eight thematic sections discuss: Near Eastern economic theory; Mesopotamia in the third millenium BC; Mesopotamia and the Levant in the first half of the first millennium BC; Levant, Egypt and the Aegean world during the same time span; Greece and Achaemenids, Parthians, Sasanians and Rome; social aspects of this exchange, including its affects on religion, borders, education and cosmology. The scope of the papers is wide, with subjects including Babylonian twin towns and ethnic minorities, archaic Greek aristocrats, the Phoenicians and the birth of a Mediterranean society, slavery, Iron Age Cyprus, Seleucid coins, the `Silk Route', and Greek images of the Assyrian and Babylonian kingdoms. Sixteen papers in English, the rest in German.