Coin Types: Their Origin and Development

Macdonald’s Rhind Lectures examine how coin types originate, persist, change, and communicate civic, religious, dynastic, and political identities. Fourteen plates support comparisons among deities, symbols, portraits, badges, and borrowed designs across regions and periods. The book is useful for framing iconographic questions, distinguishing deliberate type continuity from superficial resemblance, and understanding early twentieth-century theories of artistic influence and civic self-representation.

Because the work predates much of the modern archaeological, die-study, and provenance evidence, verify chronology, mint and ruler assignments, legend readings, authenticity, and present specimen locations against current corpora and databases.