Video: Tracing The Prize Table, The Early History Of Imperial And Provincial Agonistic Coins

American Numismatic Society - In edition 269 of our Long Table series, Tianqi Zhu, a Summer Seminar student in the class of 2025 and a PhD candidate in Classical Archeology at the University of Cincinnati, where he specializes in the archeology of the Roman East, urban festivals, and civic life, discusses the early history of agonistic coins. This category of civic coinage features festival-themed legends and iconography and was predominantly minted by Greek cities in the third century CE. Tianqi Zhu (University of Cincinnati) presents his original research from the 2025 ANS Summer Seminar to shed light on the often-neglected early development of agonistic coins before their third-century explosion. Tracing the origin of the prize table, the most frequent image on later agonistic coins, shows that agonistic coins arose from a complex and continuous interaction between provincial and imperial coinage beginning in the second half of the first century BC, and had been developing for two hundred years before the supposed turning point under Commodus.

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