Digital resources in the Social Sciences and Humanities OpenEdition Our platforms OpenEdition Books OpenEdition Journals Hypotheses Calenda Libraries OpenEdition Freemium Follow us

A new portal for the coinage of the Ostrogoths in Italy

Together with international partners, the Berlin Coin Cabinet has created a new typological portal for the coinage of the Ostrogoths in Italy, OCOI – Online Coins of Ostrogothic Italy. The portal facilitates, for the first time, searches for the coinage of the Ostrogothic kingdom in Italy from the collections of numerous German and international museums.

Screenshot of the homepage of Online Coins of Ostrogothic Italy

The kingdom of the Ostrogoths, established in AD 493 by King Theodoric, was one of the most successful Germanic states that came into existence on the territory of the old Western Roman Empire. The coins issued by the Ostrogothic kingdom no longer portrayed the Roman emperor, but rather kings. They provide important economic, visual and ideological testimony to a society that sought to appeal equally to Gothic, Italic and urban Roman populations, as well as to both the Gothic and Roman elites.

OCOI allows cross-collection searches and a range of analyses. The project was initiated by the Coin Cabinet of the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin and includes partners from public coin collections in Germany, Austria and Switzerland (ikmk.net), as well as the British Museum, London and the American Numismatic Society, New York. The latter also operates and maintains the servers.

In future, further institutions will be able to include their holdings via an API interface. This will greatly help smaller and regional collections will be able to present their collections to an international audience.

The type descriptions and concepts used are available under open licences, the images of coins of individual museums according to the licences of the relevant museums – in the case of the Berlin Coin Cabinet and the majority of partners, it is public domain.

The homepage is in German and English. The individual type descriptions are in English using the standardised concepts of the numismatic linked open data project Nomisma.org, which enables output in a variety of languages.

For more information see https://ikmk.smb.museum/news?lang=de&news_id=119


OpenEdition suggests that you cite this post as follows:
David Wigg-Wolf (February 20, 2025). A new portal for the coinage of the Ostrogoths in Italy. Digital Numismatics. Retrieved July 9, 2025 from https://nomisma.hypotheses.org/4566


You may also like...