Ancient Coins
History of currencies
The Library of Alexandria, in cooperation with the Cairo Biography Initiative, is organizing a free seminar open to the public entitled “The History of Coins”: A Study of Egyptian Coins as an Archaeological Source. The seminar will be held at 7:00 PM on Monday, November 22, at the Beit Al-Sinnari archaeological site in Sayeda Zeinab, which is affiliated with the Library.
The seminar focuses on the importance of studying Egyptian coins as a direct archaeological source for understanding the economic, cultural, architectural and artistic history of Egypt from the 30th Dynasty until the Arab conquest of Egypt, the beginnings of the Umayyad era.
The seminar will review the coins from the dynastic era, the history of minting the first Egyptian coins, the history of coinage in Egypt under the rule of the Achaemenids and the Ptolemies, the Egyptian and foreign artistic influences that appeared on the Egyptian currency, and how the Egyptian currency was used as a tool for propaganda, with the Ptolemaic-Roman period being a clear example of this.
The seminar will be lectured by Mohamed Medhat, a master's student at the Faculty of Archaeology, Cairo University. He holds a Bachelor of Arts in Psychology from Cairo University, a Bachelor of Arts in Archaeology from Ain Shams University, and a Diploma in Egyptian Archaeology from the Faculty of Archaeology, Cairo University. He has also completed several courses in the Egyptian language and in ancient Egyptian religion, and has published several articles on coins in the magazine “Al-Muqtani Al-Arabi” and on a number of Arab and Egyptian websites.
