Princeton acquires collection of Greek coins

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PRINCETON BOROUGH -- Princeton University shelled out hundreds of thousands of dollars in November to get less than a thou sand coins from a London-based businessman.

 

The university's move wasn't some dramatic hedge against the sinking value of the dollar.

Rather, it was done to make Princeton the premier public research repository of Greek coins from the late Middle Ages, said Alan Stahl, curator of the university's numismatic collection. (Numis matics is the study or collection of coins, tokens and paper money.)

 

Princeton made the purchase of the more than 800 medieval Greek coins to help researchers deepen their knowledge about a period of Middle Age history that has been little understood by scholars be cause of a dearth of primary historical accounts from that time, Stahl said.

 

Until now, there has been no specialized collection of the coins of the Greek lands of the later Middle Ages -- the 13th and 14th centuries -- available for study in a public institution anywhere, he said.

 

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