Numismatic News: First batch of Philip II coins added to PELLA

First batch of Philip II coins added to PELLA

The first few collections of Philip II coins have been linked to new Le Rider URIs and have been made accessible in PELLA through Nomisma.org's SPARQL endpoint. The American Numismatic Society linked 656 coins to these new URIs. Over the weekend, Karsten Dahmen at the Berlin Münzkabinett cataloged the first 17 coins of their collection. Additionally, I used Matt Lincoln's old data dump of years-old British Museum RDF data running locally in an endpoint to query for Le Rider references among their coins. Using OpenRefine to perform some additional cleanup, almost 60 coins of Philip II from the British Museum are now available in PELLA. Furthermore, just about a half hour ago, Julien Olivier at the Bibliothèque nationale de France sent a spreadsheet of 202 coins of Philip II with their corresponding Le Rider URIs. At this phase, there are now over 900 physical specimens linked into these typologies in PELLA. Not bad since we only just published them less than a week ago!

PELLA Philip II 137 is one of the best-represented types.

I expect a lot more contributors to come along as the cataloging process begins to proliferate through partners such as KENOM and NUMiD.

As it stands now, there are 382 total parent types in PELLA. The coins from the aforementioned collections are cataloged with a mixture of Le Rider (subtype [skos:broader] or skos:exactMatch [for plate-figure numbers]) URIs and PELLA parent type URIs. With the following SPARQL query, I can get a count of the number of photographed specimens per type:

PREFIX rdf: <http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#>
PREFIX dcterms: <http://purl.org/dc/terms/>
PREFIX foaf: <http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/>
PREFIX nm: <http://nomisma.org/id/>
PREFIX nmo: <http://nomisma.org/ontology#>
PREFIX skos: <http://www.w3.org/2004/02/skos/core#>

SELECT ?type (count(?coin) as ?count) WHERE {  
  ?type dcterms:source|skos:exactMatch/dcterms:source nm:pella_type_series .
  ?coin nmo:hasTypeSeriesItem|nmo:hasTypeSeriesItem/skos:broader ?type .
  {?coin nmo:hasObverse/foaf:depiction ?img}
  UNION {?coin foaf:depiction ?img}
} GROUP BY ?type

Hoards of Philip II coins

There are 258 types of Philip II with at least one photographed specimen, which is about two-thirds of the entire range of coinage. Not too bad for just several collections working together to catalog their coins in a few days.

Now that we have linked the Philip II Nomisma ID to typologies and specimens, some of these specimens also include hoard references, therefore populating the Philip II URI with additional research context for geographic and statistical visualization.

Average weights of tetradrachms from Philip to Alexander

As you can see from the chart above, the weight of Macedonian tetradrachms remains consistent from Philip II to Alexander until 336 B.C (https://bit.ly/2wCuH8G).