Customer Reviews

Archaic and Classical Greek Coins

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It's too bad this book is out of print and so riduculously expensive. For someone with an interest in ancient Greek coins this is probably the best book. It's about 350 pages long with lots of details that you can skip over if you have a particularly focused interest, but the chapters themselves, each focused on a particular region in classical and pre-classical coin making, are very basic to understanding the coins you are buying or thinking about buying.

This is definitely NOT a history book, but a book about the history of coins. Having studied ancient Greek and Mesopotamian history, I was definitely at an advantage in reading this book because the history is not reviewed, it is almost assumed. The book is also not a boring listing of each coin one after the other. Each chapter assumes a theme, trying to convey a deeper understanding. The writing is excellent, seemingly taking many years of experience and distilling out the basic themes and then expanding upon those themes.

Lastly, at the end of the book there is a collection of just over 1000 coin images which are referred to frequently in the text by number. Unfortunately, you will have to read this book with one finger in page 400 and the other on the pages you are reading, frequently flipping back and forth, making the reading very disruptive and slow. But if you really want to benefit from and enjoy this great book, you will have to endure and make sure to look carefully at the coins that the author is talking about. The images themselves aren't the greatest from a visual standpoint, fairly grainy black and white, but from an intellectual standpoint the way the coins are referenced was excellent, as was the breadth of images.