Enter the Collection
Every ruler who struck money had to answer the same question: why should anyone accept this? The answer is on the coin.
Walk the galleries
The Museum
A round room for each arc. Its displays stand in niches, under the rulers who claimed it and the words they struck.
Enter the museum →
Go straight to an arc
The Arcs
Thirteen arcs in order of time. Each opens on its display, its argument and its companion displays.
Choose an arc →
How the collection is arranged
The Legitimacy in Coins Project follows two thousand years of political authority, from the Persian kings of the sixth century BC to the political limits of Christendom in the West in the fifteenth century AD, through the coins that authority issued to justify itself. The portrait, or the refusal of one; the god invoked; the title claimed; the language chosen. Read together, those choices trace how legitimacy is earned, performed, inherited, and lost.
The collection is arranged in thirteen arcs. Each arc is anchored by a physical coin display set in a 7×7″ frame. Coins in these displays are chosen to argue a single thesis associated with the arc. In addition, battle, regional, temporal and case displays carry the arc’s argument further — most of them physical panels, a few drawn for this site alone — and every display has a companion page here. Threads cut across the arcs: each follows one claim to legitimacy wherever the coins carry it.
Thirteen arcs are the design. The collection is still being built toward it, and arcs and displays appear here as they are made.