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The ANS Library


jlueke

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A visit to the ANS library followed the stop at the Federal Reserve Bank. The library building is right by the subway exit, but due to construction I ambled the wrong way down Fulton for a block before finding the building. The library is located on the 5th floor where Frank Campbell greeted me and helped me get started. It would be easy to get lost in the stacks of information so I kept focused on my primary goals. My overarching focus is the changes in the styles of coin portraits over time and location. On the general topic the articles stay fairly high level. This prevents one going off on too many tangents. More specifically I am looking at 6th-7th century Western European developments. Primarily I am zeroing in on the Merovingians. There seems to be a fair number of portrait types and there is an interesting development from purely imitative issues towards a distinct style of their own. Carolingian portrait coins are rather expensive. Once I complete my reading we shall see if this is a good area to stop for a while. Sceats, deniers, and English pennies await. Staying in the 7th century I also returned to one of my earliest interests: The juxtaposition of the Byzantine, Sasanian, and Arab realms at Alexandria. I learned about the palm reverse 6 and 3 nummi. These coins have good reason to be ascribed to the Sasanian rule of Alexandria and so have moved into my want list. However, there were some setbacks as shall be seen when I discuss the coin show. Another problem I ran into was that now I am interested in the whole Alexandrian bronze series from Justinian through Heraclius. Once again a single answer yields five new questions. I also stumbled into an article on Bahram V and the Sind mint and found some interesting metrology studies on Visigothic and Austrasian Merovingian coins. All in all a very fruitful trip, and I was glad to meet Mr. Campbell as well.

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