Comprising over 59 thousand items, the Hermitage collection of ancient Greek coins ranks with the world’s largest collections of this kind. It embraces the whole range of coin types struck over the vast territory of the ancient ecumene commonly referred to as Ancient Greece, spanning a period from the 7th century BC, when the coin was introduced to the world, to the 5th century BC. The collection contains examples of coins from nearly all the ancient world’s regions, extending from Gaul, Spain and Britain in the West to Bactria and Parthia in the East. It includes the coins representing some towns of Italy (the so called Magna Graecia) and Sicily (including the finest decadrachm coins of Syracuse, amongst which one can see both the celebrated demareteion coin and some fine examples of ancient chasers’ work dating from the 5the century BC), of Central Greece regions (especially fully represented are the coins of Corinth and its colonies, from the 6th century BC to the Imperial Era minting), Attica, Peloponnesus and the islands of the Aegean Sea, Macedonia and Thrace (amongst them of particular importance is the collection of coins, which once belonged to the Macedonian and Thracian Tsars; thus, for example, there are as many as 300 Alexander the Great’s gold staters in the Museum collection, let alone over 400 tetradrachms owned by this great ruler), Moesia and Dacia, Pontus, Paphlagonia, Bithynia and Mysia with its remarkable selection of coins struck at the Cyzicus mint.
The collection of coins from the Northern Black Sea coast is the richest part of the Greek antiquity collection of numismatic art in the Hermitage and is rightfully considered to be the best in the world. It represents the coinages of all the cities (not only of such large ones as Olvia, Panticapaeum and Chersonesos) and all the rulers from the early 6th century BC until the mintage end in the 5th century BC as the Bosporan Kingdom finally disintegrated. Among these coins there are truly remarkable monuments of antique art, such as, for example, the Panticapaeum gold staters from the 5th century BC.
Starting from the earliest electrum coins of the 7th century BC, the cites of Ionia , the Troad, Aeolis, the island of Lesbos, Caria, Lydia, Phrygia, Lycia, Pamphylia, Pisidia, Cilicia, Galatia, Cappadocia and Syria are represented by the coins struck both during the autonomous period and the imperial period. Comprising over one thousand items, the collection, which once belonged to the emperors of Syria, Pergamum and Armenia, is complete and comprehensive. The collection features the coins from Mesopotamia, Phoenicia and Judaea and other eastern regions of the ancient world.
Totalling over two thousand pieces, African coins are fairly well represented in the Hermitage collection. A prominent place belongs to the unique gold coin from the mid-4th century BC. It is the most ancient Egyptian coin with hieroglyphs dating from the reign of pharaoh Nectanebo II. The collection of coins owned by the celebrated dynasty of Hellenistic emperors of the Egyptian Kingdom of Ptolemy – the descendants of Diadoch of Alexander the Great Ptolemy Lag – enables one to trace nearly the whole history of the dynasty up to 30 BC, the end of the reign of the last Empress of Egypt, Cleopatra VII.
Of great interest are the coins of the Kingdom of Aksum – ancient Ethiopia, Cyrenaica, Zeugitana (with its famous city of Carthage) and the coins of the other regions of North Africa.
All in all, the Hermitage collection of ancient Greek coins gives one a fairly good idea of the ancient world’s coins – without yielding in scope to other museums’ collections and in some cases significantly adding to them.
