The 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 following 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. Less characters would be required if duplications of glyphs are eliminated, which I do not recommend. Icard has 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 4.0 specification.
Click on the charts to enlarge
| Ancient Alphabets | Alphabet Grec | Drachm Letterforms | Greek & Derivatives |
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| 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 |
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For Unicode and some computer programs and operating systems, distinctive names are required for the letterforms.
In addition to the text characters found on ancient coins, special punctuation and symbols are necessary to describe coins, most of which are not in Unicode. I propose these characters, not already present, be submitted for inclusion in the Unicode.
Click on the charts to enlarge
| Glyph Chart | Greek Letterform Names | An Interim 8-bit Font |
|---|---|---|
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This is an outdated
8-bit font. It is not a Unicode font and is unsuitable for use on Internet web pages. It may be useful for internal
documents or those to be exchanged with others who own the same font.
Despite the attractive potential of Unicode, the addition of characters to Unicode is a lengthy process, and final approval of the epigraphy associations' recommendations is perhaps several years in the future. When and if approved, I intend to incorporate these characters into a Unicode-compliant font.
In the meantime, given the number of characters represented in the literature, it is possible to create a font within the approximately 220 characters available for glyphs in an 8-bit font. For practical and immediate availability on Macintosh and Windows computers, an interim 8-bit font has been prepared in the below format. In this font, a glyph appears only once, regardless of its intended literary value. For example, a Greek capital Lambda appears only once in the font, but the lambda letterform has been used on ancient coins to represent Alpha, Delta and Omega.
Click here to learn more about the 8-bit font.
This page last updated 06 Mar 2019
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