Two for Tuesday from Hesperia

I was excited to see that the latest issue of Hesperia (93.1 for those of you keeping a scorecard) arrived just in time for the weekend. Since there was no Formula 1 this weekend, I was able to read an article during the time that I would have ordinarily been sitting and listlessly watching a car race.

There were two articles of note in the recent issue. One is the official “not a preliminary report” from our work in the Western Argolid Regional Project. This article has been a long time coming. At some point, I know that I wrote a good bit for it and it went through a bit of a meat grinder during the pandemic with some significant reorganizations and direction changes and now … we have an article! The long gestation of this article reflects both the challenges of writing as a committee as well as the pandemic inflected situation from which it arose. In fact, I can’t remember the last time that I saw my co-authors face-to-face (other than Melanie Godsey in Cyprus last summer).

In any event, it is out thanks to my coauthors who did not lose faith in it. If you want an offprint of it, drop me a line.

At almost 50 pages we anticipated that our joint with be the longest in the issue (our generous royalties are dictated partly by the percentage of pages that our work constitutes for the issue as a whole), but we were outdone by a sixty page article on a single Tang dynasty coin in a 13th century context from Corinth: Ching-Yuan Wu’s “A Tang Dynasty Coin in 13th-Century Corinth: Context and Transmission.”

Yeah, the royalty thing was a joke.

Wu’s article, on the other hand, is not. It’s brilliant. 

First, the coin itself, which you can see here, is a MacGuffin. A single 8th century coin in a 13th century fill isn’t sufficient to say much about anything even if the coin is a very long way from home.

The coin’s unique dimensions and weight give us some hints of its story which appears to have its origins in the confusion (and unfamiliar to me) history of 8th century Central Asia where rival empires and their puppets and allies clashed, traded, and negotiated. The gossamer strands traced by Wu dissolve into ambiguity but hint at ties to the “Church of the East,” Judeo-Persian traders, and the chaotic aftermath of the Persian Empire (whose heir Peroz, the son of the Yazdegerd III, died in Chang’an).

The coins travels from the East and its arrival in the Mediterranean introduce us to an interconnected world where the so-called “End of Antiquity” not only didn’t disrupt millennia-old networks of contact across Central Asia, but also activated new ones structured, for example, by the “Church of the East” which had established churches from Salamis on Cyprus to the western borders of the Tang Empire in China. Judeo-Persian traders who moved through the polyglot communities of Central Asia and traded as well as fulfilled certain diplomatic functions. 

Of course, knowing that these communities and groups existed and being able to trace the exact route of this one Tang period coin are two different things. And even if it was possible to know where and how the coin reached Corinth, the exceptional character of this find, in this context, at this site will make it hard to generalize. That said, the coin did afford an opportunity to bring China and the Mediterranean a bit closer together through the detailed examination of the circumstances that could have brought this coin to Corinth.

In the end, this 60+ page article has almost nothing to do with the coin and its context at Corinth, but provides a narrow foundation for a much larger story that, in the end, is probably more relevant for how we understand the 8th century world than any specific context at any specific site. It is a credit to Hesperia that they were willing to publish something like this. Not only is this paper massive, but it ultimately uses this coin to survey a disparate and fascinating body of scholarship that offers a foundation for integrating “traditional Mediterranean archaeology” (among the most parochial archaeologies) into a broader conversation about global connectivity.

Postscript

One thing that I wish Hesperia would start doing is insisting that authors link to the massive digital archive at ASCSA.net. This includes links to the coin itself (here), its context (here), the pages in the notebook (here), and other objects associated with the coin in the same fill (here). While I understand that some of these links are not stable, it is nevertheless possible to create stable links (e.g. this).

It would also be wonderful for an article like this, that might be read by scholars well outside of the usual Hesperia readership, to offer links to relevant earlier Hesperia articles outside of JSTOR (such as this one here). One of the best things that Hesperia did many years ago is release their archive for free. It feels like they could do more to celebrate these accomplishments and take ownership of their quiet leadership in not only improving access to the raw materials necessary for archaeological analysis and study, but also the century of scholarship from Corinth.