04 Le “antiche Monete della Cirenaica”nella letteratura numismatica tra Ottocento e Novecento

The coinage of ancient Cyrenaica stimulated and keeps on stimulating the interest of historians, numismatists and collectors, especially in reason of the recurrence of the coin type of silphium, a now extinct plant, once used for its medicinal and probably also hallucinogen effects by the Libyans and Greeks settled in Cyrenaica. Consequently, since the Sixteenth century this type of documentation has been used as a tool for investigating the past of the region. The volume by Michele Asolati, Le “antiche Monete della Cirenaica”nella letteratura numismatica tra Ottocento e Novecento. Genesi della nummologia della Pentapolitana Regio, outlines the history of the studies of this particular source, through the long and sometimes tortuous path which, during four centuries, leads to the more conscious and sophisticated elaborations of the second half of the Nineteenth and early Twentieth centuries. This work combines both the dissertation and the anastatic re-editions of some of the most significant publications of the scholars who between Nineteenth and Twentieth centuries laid the foundations of Cyreniac numismatics, such as Celestino Cavedoni and Adolphe Duchalais, coming up to the almost unknown text by Silvio Ferri, published in Benghazi in 1924, a few years before the edition of the volume by Robinson, which is still today to be considered of a capital relevance on this topic. Starting from the little evidence of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth centuries the volume considers the more fruitful studies of the Eighteenth century, more specifically of the second half of this century, when the refinement of new numismatic tools, and in particular the use of coin finds, allowed less uncertain acquisitions. This evolution is made of uncertain interpretations, of antiquarian inventions, of attributions which are often the result of the imagination or of the “libido innovandi” of the scholars, which so frequently leave a heavy legacy on subsequent studies, until the Nineteenth century when archaeological expeditions in Cyrenaica and a new scientific approach allow to define the structure of the Greek and Roman monetary production in this region.