November 4, 2018

Modern Study of the Coinage

By Stuart Munro-Hay

The rediscovery of the Aksumite coinage has been a slow process. Nathaniel Pearce, who was in Ethiopia at the beginning of the nineteenth century, may have been the first to describe Aksumite coins (although parts of his descriptions are hard to reconcile with the Aksumite series, and may have referred to Roman coins found at Aksum instead). He says, speaking of the wells at Aksum, “I was told . . . that in clearing out the rubbish of a well which, (the Greek Apostella) had discovered, he found some gold coins which he shewed me; and indeed, two of the same kind came into my possession several months afterwards, but, unfortunately, having forwarded them to Mr. Salt, they were lost upon the road. One of them had a bald man’s head upon one side and apparently arms upon the reverse, the second had a woman’s head, with a forked crown on it, and something imitating a balance or scales; the characters were Greek. The coin was as thick in the middle as an English half crown, though not thicker than a shilling round the edges, and in circumference about the size of a guinea” (Pearce 1831: 163). The thicker central part of the flan sounds like a description of the coins of Endubis, as does the `bald man’s head’, whilst the forked crown might be a description of the Aksumite tiara; but neither of the reverses sounds Aksumite.

As the nineteenth century progressed, a few scholars noted a coin here and there; Halévy in 1837, Rüppell in the 1840s, Langlois in 1859, Kenner, von Heuglin, Longperier and d’Abbadie in the 1860s, Friedländer in 1879, Drouin, Prideaux, von Sallet and Schlumberger in the 1880s. In 1913 Littmann published the DAE report, with a chapter on the coins. Much more significant were the publications of Arturo Anzani in 1926, 1928, and 1941, and of Carlo Conti Rossini in 1927. Since then there has been a steady, though sparse, appearance of publications gradually enlarging the known corpus of coins, and commenting on their historical and numismatic significance. A full bibliography is given in Munro-Hay (1984).