Numismatica Pro Font

A Numismatic Font with
Archaic, Classical and Hellenistic Greek Characters

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Introduction
Numismatic Letterforms
Greek Letterforms Not Contained in Unicode

Introduction

Numismatica is a Unicode computer font of archaic, classical and Hellenistic Greek letterforms, plus monograms and control marck required to catalog coins. The font is the result of a team effort and you are invited to recommend changes to the font to improve its usefulness to scholars, numismatists, collectors — in short, anyone needing to communicate electronically about ancient Greek coin legends. The latest version is distributed for free on the Internet. To download the Numismatica Pro font, click here

The Unicode version of the font was created by Edward C. D. Hopkins in 2017. Numismatica Pro is based on the work of several font designers who have permitted incorporation of their work. The baseline Latin, Greek and Cyrillic character sets are from the BPreplay font by George Triantafyllakos. Several monogram glyphs were borrowed from the series of Seleucid monogram fonts designed by Catharine Lorber and from fonts designed by Brad Nelson of Classical Numismatic Group, Inc. Additional monograms were contributed by Dr. Farhad Assar of Oxford, England. I drew the majority of monograms by hand based on photos of actual Parthian coins. The many variations of archaic and ancient Greek letterforms were adapted from my earlier Numismatica symbol font and are consistent with their use in Dave Perry’s Cardo font. The Numismatica Pro font was created in support of this web site and the Sylloge Nummorum Parthicorum project.

Numismatic Letterforms

The pertinent literature includes documentation of many numismatic letterforms. B.V. Head, Historia Numorum (1911), summarized the Greek and Latin characters used on coins and provided the baseline for most later scholars. A study of Sayle's alphabet chart, a synthesis of Head, shows approximately 173 characters are needed to represent this chart if they are considered in alpha-sort groups. Icard has a few variances with Head. Olson and Mitchiner add eastern forms. Many of the characters required for numismatic description of ancient coins are not found in the Unicode 12.0 specification.

Click on the charts to enlarge

Ancient Alphabets	Alphabet Grec	Drachm Letterforms	Greek & Derivatives
W. Sayles, Ancient Coin Collecting (1996), p. 97	S. Icard, Dictionary of Greek Coin Inscriptions (1968), p. 567	R. Olson, Visible Language, 1973, vol. VII, no. 1, p. 29	M. Mitchiner, Ancient & Classical World (1978), p. 20

Greek Letterforms Not Contained in Unicode

Unicode is a font standard designed to cover the characters of all the world's major living languages including scientific symbols and dead languages that are the subject of scholarly interest. Unicode 15.0 defines 144,000 characters from the world's alphabets, ideograph sets, and symbol collections; more than a million are technically possible. In most character sets, a single value is often assigned to several characters. For example, in ASCII a "-" is used to represent a hyphen, a minus sign, a dash, and a non-breaking hyphen. In Unicode, each meaning is given its own code point; that is, a hyphen is represented by a character different from a minus sign, and so forth.

The Unicode standard contains only one instance of each character and assigns it a unique name and code value. Special codes are provided for multiple variants of a character, and "Private Use Areas" are set aside for proprietary use. Because a single Greek letter letter may have numerous different letterforms, or glyphs, it is necessary to store these variant glyphs in Unicode's Private Use Area. Drawing on the above documents and expert advice, I defined a glyph chart for a Greek numismatic font. Unicode, and some specialty computer programs and operating systems, require distinctive names for the letterforms. In addition to the Greek characters found on ancient coins, special punctuation and symbols are necessary to describe coins. For more on this subject, refer to Leiden Conventions for Greek Numismatic Epigraphy. Many monograms and control marks are not in defined Unicode, but are available in the Numismatica Pro font.

Drawing on the above and other sources, I prepared the following two charts to illustrate the glyphs used to describe Greek letters used on ancient coins and their descriptive names. All the these glyphs are contained in the Numismatica Pro font.