Scott McDonough

Poster with images of Roman Libertas Denarius, Tetradrachm of Antioch, and Flowing Hair American Dollar). Poster Text: Drachmai, Denarii, and Dollars: Ancient Coins and the Imagery of a New Republic A Public Talk and Hands-On Workshop With Professor Scott McDonough Atrium Auditorium William Paterson University 12:30-1:45 PM Wednesday, March 4, 2026 Refreshments served after workshop

I'm doing this coins Workshop tomorrow at William Paterson University. If you're near Wayne, NJ, feel free to stop by. I can't guarantee it will be revolutionary (Semiquincentennial pun half-intended), but it should be a fun time.

I think installing ArcGIS and photo printer drivers repeatedly might be what finally wore down my IT department.

“Indifferent to suffering; insensitive to joy. All of life is reduced to the common rubble of banality. War, murder, death are all the same to you as bottles of beer. And the daily business of life is a corrupt comedy.”

Thanks for the photo! I've been looking for ideas for a short road trip in New Mexico in April, this might be a nice stop.

In 2026, colleges must teach students that this is not the end of the world. We must teach hope. Current undergraduates can barely remember a time before the threats of climate change and authoritarianism loomed to catastrophic scale. Since 2010, the future depicted in TV, books, and games has been dystopian or apocalyptic, so for our current students the end of the world feels more familiar and realistic than a future with hope. Now we are asking them to choose majors and life paths when the desirability, indeed the very existence, of whole sectors of employment are in question, due to the overwhelming promises of LLMs and machine learning. As young people hear daily that vocation after vocation may vanish into automation’s maw, and that democracy, liberty, land, sea, and sky are all in jeopardy, despair is growing. Despair is very emotionally tempting. It means freedom from the responsibility to shape the future. This is a terrifying turning point, but many generations before us have faced such turning points, and met them. We can offer our students perspective. Only a few dozen institutions on Earth are more than 900 years old, and the vast majority are universities. The university system is not a house of straw to buckle in this storm: We are the rocks that have sheltered the knowledge, hope, and truth through tumults which have toppled kingdoms while classrooms endured. We can endure this, and be a guiding light through it, but only by recentering, by teaching citizens, not workers; power, not PowerPoint; aspiration, not apocalypse. Despair is how we lose. The classroom is where we battle it. All other battles flow from here. Ada Palmer is an associate professor of history at the University of Chicago.

This, from Ada Palmer as part of The Chronicle's survey of 11 scholars on the future of higher ed, is what I needed to end the week.

Obverse of coin of Wahrām II with King, Queen, and Prince.

Reverse of coin of Wahrām II with fire altar flanked by two attendants.

Here is Joseph Pellerin's engraving of a similar coin from his Recueil de médailles (1762–78). Thanks Dan Sheffield for the search suggestion.

Silver of the Sassanidae. A remarkable coin, with three portraits of the king, queen, and prince; brought by Mr. Crofts from the east, and now in Dr. Hunter's collection. Unpublished.

Pinkerton's description of the coin

Illustration of Sasanian Drachm of Wahrām II, showing obverse with King, Queen, and Prince. Reverse with fire altar and two attendants.

While putting together Wednesday's public talk on ancient and early American coins, I came across this illustration of a drachm of Wahrām II from John Pinkerton's Essay on Medals, Volume One (1789). I wonder if there might be any older drawings of Sasanian coins?
#numismatics

Could the phone camera be picking up infrared, outside the visible light spectrum? I think daffodils are pretty bright in infrared.

A lead ingot in sharp light

#FindsFriday Sharp sunlight strikes across the Ceredigion lead pig during safekeeping in @rcahmwales.bsky.social offices 🌞😮

The lettering makes no doubt about ownership..🧐

IMP DOMIT CAES AVG XIII COS (Property) of the Emperor Domitian Caesar Augustus, consul for the thirteenth time

📷 My own

It’s surprisingly comfortable.

I'm particularly fascinated by the persistence of the phrase "čihr az yazdān" "seed from the gods" found on early inscriptions and coins. I also wonder if that's the phrase the Christian Bishops sanitized as "brought forth from the famous race of a glorious kingdom" in the Synod of Mar Īšōʿyahḇ I?

Thanks so much for making this article available. Fascinating stuff. It seems as though the Acts of the Synods of the Church of the East also preserve a lot of this titulature (rendered into Syriac).

“The assembled populace applauded wildly as they watched the moon, gleaming like chains, white as a silver fist, rise high over Sovietland. No one in the crowd wanted to be the first to stop clapping. The ever-intensifying ovation continued; palms stung, fingers swelled, blisters burst. People clapped the skin from their flesh. Tendon sprang loose of muscle, muscle slipped from bone, and still the applause grew louder. Bloody spray resettled as opaque fog, enshrouding the crowd. As the people vanished within the red cloud, they continued to cheer the moon for having delivered the darkness they craved. In the moon’s face was the silent, mustachioed face of the Father of Night: the man after our own hearts, the man who missed nothing, the man who forever found you out, the man who knew you better than you would ever know yourself. Why did no one realize that if we built hell on earth there would be nothing to look forward to?” Excerpt From Let's Put the Future Behind Us Jack Womack This material may be protected by copyright.

Somehow I'm reminded of the end of the scene from Jack Womack's "Let's Put the Future Behind Us" where the post-Soviet protagonist dreams of a lost Stalinist future:

Evidently, Columbian Big-Butt Ants are a delicacy. Per my Google search for Buttants.

I was reading an article where someone called the residents of Butte, Montana "Buttants." Wanting to see if this was a real term, I turned to Google, and immediately fell down another rabbit hole: "Butt Ants."

Evidently the actual demonym is: "Butteans" or "Buttians." But "Buttant" is pretty great.

I…what level of supersessionism have we reached

Messed up the venue in the initial post, it's going to be in Atrium Hall, not the library.

Drachmai, Denarii, and Dollars: Ancient Coins and the Imagery of a New Republic A Public Talk and Hands-On Workshop With Professor Scott McDonough Library Auditorium William Paterson University 12:30-1:45 PM Wednesday, March 4, 2026 Refreshments served after workshop

I'm running this workshop on my campus next week, should be fun. It's a public talk, but scheduled during my department's Historical Methods class. I ran a similar workshop about two years ago, and people really enjoyed having the opportunity to look at some ancient coins up close.
#numismatics

Still of James Cagney holding a bottle of Pepsi from One, Two, Three.

Have you seen "One, Two, Three"? It's one of my favorites. It's hilarious and also an odd snapshot of the era just before the Wall went up.

Two panel comic. Panel 1: a museum display of a megalodon jaw fossil, with some museum goers standing around it. There is a graphic on the information tablet next to the fossil, depicting the approximation of the megalodon’s full size compared to a human. Panel 2: “3.6 million years ago:” we see the true megalodon as it existed, a small shark with ludicrously large, juicy lips.

Close up on a gorgeous astrolabe in shiny brass and covered in Kufi characters

The astrolabe being dismantled by the gloved hands of the curator

Inside of the mater revealed, covered in a concentric grid of Abjad numerals

Context shot showing the astrolabe on a protected surface, together with a larger astrolabe, a much smaller one (the size of a fob watch), dismantled, a globe and an armillary sphere, all brass

I’ve admired this 1068 Toledo astrolabe in its case and I studied every millimeter of it on digital images, and today I got to handle it with the medieval manuscripts group. Oxford is wild.

Luster potters migrated to the city of Kashan in Iran where luster ware reached its greatest height during the 1170s until about 1220. This masterful dish features a mounted polo player, a figure representing the Iranian ideal of beauty with a round moon-like face and fine features.

Luster Dish with Polo Player https://clevelandart.org/art/1944.74

The spectacular nave of Durham Cathedral with its massive Norman drum columns.
📸2025

Central Asian Caravan Woman Rousing her Camel While Nursing ORIGINAL LANGUAGE TITLE 騎駱駝哺乳婦人俑 CULTURE Chinese DATE 8th century C.E. MEDIUM Earthenware with unfired coloring DIMENSIONS Overall: 16 × 18 × 11 inches (40.64 × 45.72 × 27.94 cm) CREDIT LINE Purchase: the Richard J. Stern Foundation for the Arts--Commerce Bank, Trustee, and Hall Family Foundation Endowment for the Oriental Department OBJECT NUMBER 2002.7 ON VIEW On view GALLERY LOCATION 229 COLLECTIONS East Asian Art TERMS ChineseCeramicsTang dynasty (618-906 C.E.)

Good afternoon and major props to this 8th century CE woman breastfeeding as she rides a Bactrian camel along the Silk Roads 🐫 art.nelson-atkins.org/objects/3254...

Yes. I love tetradrachms because they are big enough for a nice sized portrait and they have a very appealing heft in the hand (supposed to be about 17 grams of silver…or silver-ish base metal for the later ones, often a bit lighter, but still lovely).

I do have an Antioch tetradrachm with a bust of Nero, also (not Roman) a Sasanian 4-drachm of Ardašir I. When I have time, I’ll lay them all out chronologically for photos: from the 5th century BCE Athenian owl to the 3rd century CE Sasanian.

Obverses of three tetradrachms, 2 Seleucid (above) and one Indo-Greek (below). Seleucid coins feature right-facing busts wearing diadems. The Indo-Greek coin has right facing bust wearing plumed helmet, with Greek inscription "King [and] Savior Menander."

Reverses. Top left, standing figure of Zeus with Greek inscription "King Antiochus [God] Manifest." Top right, seated figure of Zeus with Greek inscription, "King Philip [God] Manifest Philadelphos" Bottom: Standing figure of Athena with Karsoshthi inscription, "Great King Menamdrasa, Savior"

Hello, my name is Scott and I'm a tetradrachm-o-holic...

My 2 cents about The Atlantic’s Mellon Foundation polemic and humanities funding:

Beyond its specious content, the article illustrates something truly dangerous: the normalization of conspiratorial tropes about externally funded research in universities originally seen in extremist propaganda. 1/5

I also thought that deportations were meant to remove people “steelin’ our jobs”? Oops, guess it was just about white supremacy after all!

Screenshot from Tumblr User hatingongodot: “In 1404, King Taejong fell from his horse during a hunting expedition. Embarrassed, looking to his left and right, he commanded, “Do not let the historian find out about this.” To his disappointment, the historian accompanying the hunting party included these words in the annals, in addition to a description of the king’s fall.“ LMFAOOOOOO rip to that guy User Shitacademicswrite: i thought maybe this was fake, but there’s even a citation! Taejong Sillok Book 7. 5th year of King Taejong’s Reign (1404), February 8.

Never forget the anniversary of King Taejong falling off his horse!