Exploring ancient Greek coins for questions of visual and cultural history, and developing an iconographic thesaurus based on Linked Open Data.

Ancient coins represent a unique visual medium that allows for the systematic linking of image analyses and contextual information. This enables central image-related questions to be connected to the historically and spatially specific production and use of coins, examining the relationship between image and meaning, image and medium, image and text, image production and consumption, as well as seriality and originality. Through their cross-media interweaving, coins emerge as a key category for understanding the visual culture of antiquity.

The ImagNum project provides, for the first time, a tool for the field of classical studies that visualizes and contextualizes image transfers. The Academies’ research project pursues four core objectives:

1. Publishing Greek coins from the Berlin Coin Cabinet (114,845 objects), one of the world’s most significant collections, to illustrate the object-historical dimension of numismatic iconography.
2. Developing an Image Thesaurus (Thesaurus Iconographicus Nummorum Graecorum), based on Linked Open Data with persistent identifiers and standardized exchange formats, enabling context-sensitive evaluations of ancient visual language.
3. Creating digital infrastructure and AI tools that interconnect the communicative and contextual aspects of coins, facilitating analysis.
4. Performing selective research to address central questions in the history of visual and cultural studies.

IMAGINES NVMMORVM: Thesaurus Iconographicus Nummorum Graecorum Online is part of the Research Centre for Primary Sources of the Ancient World  at the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities. The Long-term Academy project "Antiquitatum Thesaurus: Antiquities in European Visual Sources from the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries" is part of the Academies’ Programme,  a research funding programme co-financed by the German federal government and individual federal states. Coordinated by the Union of the German Academies of Sciences and Humanities,  the Programme intends to retrieve and explore our cultural heritage, to make it accessible and highlight its relevance to the present, as well as to preserve it for the future.