Monnaie et économie dans l'Athènes classique : essai de mise en perspective du phénomène monétaire à travers l'examen des documents relatifs à l'histoire financière d'Athènes
(2005)
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- Authors
- Supervisors
- Marchetti, Patrick
- Abstract
- Throughout the close examination of historical documents, this doctoral dissertation is an attempt to understand the monetizing of the Athenian economy in the classical period: because of the fixity of their monetary types, the huge quantities produced and the lack of any symbol, few information can actually be draw from the coins themselves. After having reviewed the studies devoted to the Athenian coinage until now and picked out the main difficulties which encumber the understanding of the coinage, this dissertation is divided in two parts. The first one is devoted to the Athenian money and its implication in the economy of this ancient city by studying the historical documents. To shed light on this coinage, it was essential to reconstruct the global structure of the Athenian finance where the money was integrated. In this scope, it was therefore important to envisage both the fifth and the fourth centuries. To reconstruct the flux of currency created by the financial transactions of the Athenian State, we had identified and quantified the income and expenditure of the City. A close examination of the conditions of silver extraction in the Laureion mines and of two epigraphic documents allows us to establish that the main parameter which determines the frequency and the size of the coin production was not war campaign, but miner s obligations. The second part of this study is devoted to the Athenian coins, that is to say the way we can classify them and the information we can get from metallurgical investigations. The engraver s styles identified on coins are so numerous that to superpose them chronologically would be a fatal error; most of those styles were in fact produced in the same time and the difficulty is, of course, to determine which ones are contemporary. The sole solution was to observe the associations of styles on coins; we have so defined tree groups which could correspond to tree engraver s generation working successively from 460 to 405 in the Athenian minting installations. The chemical or physical methods used to determine the metallic composition of the Athenian coins were so different that the results can t be placed on the same level. We undertake then a critical examination of the analytical methods used in order to determine their liability. After this preliminary inquiry, we finally try to evaluate the contribution of those analyses to the study of the Athenian coinage.
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Citations
Flament, C. (2005). Monnaie et économie dans l’Athènes classique : essai de mise en perspective du phénomène monétaire à travers l’examen des documents relatifs à l’histoire financière d’Athènes. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/198225