Coins issued by Alexander and in his name after his death exist today in their millions, scattered in collections across the world. But they are also the victim, as small pieces of precious metal, of destruction and looting in their source countries. The OPAL project will make available online a corpus of 3,500 coins of Alexander in the collection of the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford and the Bibliothèque nationale de France in Paris and will contribute the data to the PELLA project of the American Numismatic Society.
The conference will investigate the homogenizing effect of the coinage of Alexander the Great on the economic history of the Mediterranean, the Near East, and Central Asia as well as advertising and exploring the value of amalgamated collections. The conference will look at the new tools created by Linked Open Data and the Semantic Web as well as their technical composition. It will present new research on the coinage of Alexander, much of which made possible by new opportunities afforded by the PELLA tool. And it will conclude by focussing particularly on the legacy of Alexander the Great, from shortly after his death to the present day, and discussing the importance of preserving such transnational heritage and the role in this that projects like OPAL and PELLA can play.

Programme

Monday 3rd April

10.00 Registration

10.15 Introduction (Frédérique Duyrat & Andrew Meadows)

Part 1: New tools
(Chair: Andrew Meadows)

10.30 Equality and Concept: Broadening the Scope of Linked Open Data
Sebastian Heath

11.00 ANS Digital Projects: A Comprehensive Platform for the Study of Numismatics
Ethan Gruber

11.30 Statistical exploration of PELLA data
Julien Olivier

12.00 Lunch break

Part 2: Imperial economic space - using PELLA to write a new history
(Chair: Robin Lane Fox)

1.30 What is an Alexander?
Andrew Meadows

2.00 The Destruction and Recreation of Monetary Zones in the Wake of Alexander’s Conquests
Peter van Alfen

2.30 Exploring localities: a die study of Alexanders from Damascus
Simon Glenn

3.00 Tea break

3.30 The impact of Alexander’s conquest on minted silver: new data from metallurgical analysis of coins kept at the BnF
Maryse Blet-Lemarquand, Julien Olivier, Caroline Carrier

4.00 The first generation of Alexander’s influence: diversity of empire
Karsten Dahmen

4.30 Alexander gold coinage throughout the Empire and beyond
Frédérique Duyrat

5.00 General discussion

6.00 Reception at the Ashmolean Museum

Tuesday 4th April

Part 3: Cultural interaction and legacy (Chair: Frédérique Duyrat)

9.30 The coinage of Alexander the Great as perceived during the 16th -18th centuries
François de Callataÿ

10.00 The legacy of Alexander: money in Central Asia
Simon Glenn

10.30 Looting and its impact: the case of Alexanders from the Near East and the role of an online corpus project
Caroline Carrier & Simon Glenn

11.00 The debate about the spread of Alexander's coinage and its economic impact: engaging with the historiographical longue durée
Pierre Briant

11.30 The Virtual Museum of Alexander the Great
Angeliki Kottaridi

12.00 Conclusion: Alexander: the Wider Vision
Robin Lane Fox