Sardis, capital city of the Lydian and Persian kings, stronghold of the Seleukid kings, metropolis of Roman Asia, and episcopal see in the Byzantine period, has been the focus of archaeological research since the early 1900s. This monograph focuses on the over 8,000 coins minted in the Lydian, Hellenistic, Roman, and Byzantine periods that were excavated between 1973 and 2013 in the Harvard-Cornell Expedition.

The book places coins within eastern Mediterranean historical, cultural, and economic contexts, in order to better understand the monetized economy of Sardis. It adds important archaeological context to shed light on the uses of coins and the nature of the deposits, with attention paid to the problems of monetary circulation and chronological development of the deposits, especially in the Late Roman period. Statistical analyses, including a new method of analyzing the deposits, help define the nature and chronological horizons of the strata. A catalog of the coins concludes the main body of the study, followed by appendices on countermarks, monograms, and statistical analyses.

Framed by the decline of the Heian aristocracy in the late 1100s and the rise of the Tokugawa shogunate in the early 1600s, Japan’s medieval era was a chaotic period of diffuse political power and frequent military strife. This instability prevented central authorities from regulating trade, issuing currency, enforcing contracts, or guaranteeing property rights. But the lack of a strong central government did not inhibit economic growth. Rather, it created opportunities for a wider spectrum of society to participate in trade, markets, and monetization.

Peripheral elites—including merchants, warriors, rural estate managers, and religious leaders—devised new ways to circumvent older forms of exchange by importing Chinese currency, trading in local markets, and building an effective system of long-distance money remittance. Over time, the central government recognized the futility of trying to stifle these developments, and by the sixteenth century it asserted greater control over monetary matters throughout the realm.

Drawing upon diaries, tax ledgers, temple records, and government decrees, Ethan Isaac Segal chronicles how the circulation of copper currency and the expansion of trade led to the start of a market-centered economy and laid the groundwork for Japan’s transformation into an early modern society.

This volume addresses the question of the relation between sculpture and coins—or large statuary and miniature art—in the private and public domain. It originates in the Harvard Art Museums 2011 Ilse and Leo Mildenberg interdisciplinary symposium celebrating the acquisition of Margarete Bieber’s coin collection. The papers examine the function of Greek and Roman portraiture and the importance of coins for its identification and interpretation. The authors are scholars from different backgrounds and present case studies from their individual fields of expertise: sculpture, public monuments, coins, and literary sources.

Sculpture and Coins also pays homage to the art historian Margarete Bieber (1879–1978) whose work on ancient theater and Hellenistic sculpture remains seminal. She was the first woman to receive the prestigious travel fellowship from the German Archaeological Institute and the first female professor at the University of Giessen. Dismissed by the Nazis, she came to the United States and taught at Columbia. This publication cannot answer all the questions: its merit is to reopen and broaden a conversation on a topic seldom tackled by numismatists and archaeologists together since the time of Bernard Ashmole, Phyllis Lehmann and Léon Lacroix.