New tool for exploring the Coinage and Mints of Alexander the Great

Kaleun96 · October 15, 2022

I've recently been working on a new "tool" for my website that leverages data from PELLA/American Numismatic Society to make it easier to explore the different mints that produced coins in the name of Alexander the Great. PELLA is a great tool itself and irreplaceable in many respects but there's a few things that could be done to make it easier to visualise the different mints, their relative locations and output, as well as similarities they may have in their production of Alexander types.

Click on the following link or URL to view the "Coins of Alexander Map": https://artemis-collection.com/coins-of-alexander/map/

The "Mints" panel on the left side lists all mints in alphabetical order. If you use a filter, this list will exclude mints that don't match the filter conditions.

Click on a mint in the list or on one of the blue mint markers on the map to view more details about that mint.

The map shows all known mints that produced coins in the name of Alexander (and Philip III + Lysimachos types in Price) and provides a bunch of filters that you won't find in PELLA to help identify particularly interesting or unique mints. Filters like date of the appearance of "ΒΑΣΙΛΕΩΣ" at that mint, when the mint started/stopped production, how many unique types it was known to produce, and more. The size of the markers are in proportion to the number of total Alexander types produced at each mint.

From the "Filters" panel, you can set your filters to narrow down the list of mints you want to view by their attributes.

This will update both the "mint" list shown in the previous image, as well as the gallery of Price types below the map.

You can also tilt the view of the map to see the topography of the landscape. See details on page for instructions.

Clicking on either a mint from the side panel or a marker on the map will zoom you into that location and show you a summary of details about that mint. Below the map, every Price type belonging to a mint included in your search filters will be shown so you can get a quick look at the different types across the mints. Toggling the "Show only selected mints" button will limit these Price types to any mint you have clicked on in the map.

Below the map you can see a list of individual types from the list of filtered mints. You can sort this list by a couple of different attributes like date and # of Coins for each type in PELLA.

Enabling the toggle will further limit the types to any mint you have "active" in the left panel (i.e. showing the summary details)

Some things to keep in mind:

Desktop/laptop only for now. It will not look good on mobile, it will be practically unusable, and may not be suited for small screens like tablets (don't have one myself to test).
This is one of several tools I have planned related to the PELLA database and is specifically aimed at exploring the mints of Alexander, not the types of coins themselves. So when you use the search filters, keep in mind you're filtering on the characteristics of the mints, not of the types within the mints. Another tool will be aimed at analysing the types in more detail.
This tool is a work-in-progress and you may see it change or stop working briefly over the next week or so. If you have any comments/suggestions, feel free to share them below.
I checked with ANS before using their data and images to make sure I'm complying with their non-commercial use terms. Many of the types with only one or two coins in PELLA have no images in my tool because those images come from other collections and I need to check the terms of each collection before incorporating them into this.

So far I have only been able to test this in Chrome on Windows and Mac. It's possible you may experience bugs if using another browser, or possibly even the same browser. Please feel free to let me know if you notice anything that looks like it's not working correctly 🙂 Thanks!