A major aim of the CHANGE project is to delineate the institutional contexts in which money and the monetary economy functioned in pre-Roman Anatolia. The evidence for such contexts comes largely in the form of texts inscribed on stone and metal, which range from official letters and civic decrees to temple inventories and private dedications. Inscriptions encompass several genres of political, social, and economic activity involving the use of money, both coined and non-coined, and moreover by different human and non-human actors, including gods, imperial rulers, cities, associations and individuals.
In mobilising this material towards a history of monetary economy, two outputs are envisioned. The first is the creation of an index of monetary institutions and terms through a survey of the epigraphy of Anatolia from the 7th to 1st centuries BCE (c. 10,000 texts). This will include a catalogue of epigraphic testimonia for monetary activity and will be made available through an Open Access online publication. Secondly, this index and catalogue will be brought into connection with the coinage by being converted into a Linked Open Data vocabulary and ontology, which will be incorporated into the existing numismatic resources hosted both by the nomisma.org namespace and our sibling project, FAIR Epigraphy. This will facilitate the concurrent analysis of both epigraphic and numismatic evidence for monetary behaviour at a large scale, over time, and over different regions – cross-disciplinary work that has not been possible up till now.
