Münzkabinett SMB

Description

In the Bode Museum in the Mitte district of Berlin is the Münzkabinett der Staatlichen Museen zu Berlin, an internationally comparable collection of numismatic objects that forms part of a network with collections in London, Paris, Vienna and St. Petersburg.

Its origins lie in the Kunstkammer of the Electors of Brandenburg; early inventory records go back to the 17th century, when an inventory listed around 5,000 predominantly ancient coins. Scholarly cataloguing began already in the 17th century and again in the early 19th century. Because of warfare in the 18th and early 19th centuries the collection was relocated several times and was partly damaged or lost in the process. During the course of the 18th and early 19th centuries responsibility for the collection changed hands repeatedly, before it was handed over to the Royal Museum in 1830 and displayed in the Altes Museum. From the mid-19th century it attained museum status and benefited until about 1918 from targeted support that made extensive purchases, finds acquisitions and donations possible. At the beginning of the 20th century it moved into the newly built Kaiser-Friedrich-Museum, where secure storage rooms were created in the basement for the chronological arrangement of the holdings. During the Second World War large parts were put into storage and were later taken to the Soviet Union during the occupation period; a reassessment and exhibition in Berlin began in the 1950s as the collection was gradually returned and made accessible again. After renovation work since 2006 four display rooms are available, in which around 5,000 objects are on permanent display; the ancient coins are also shown in the Altes Museum (Blaues Gewölbe). Unlike many other collections of the Staatliche Museen, the Münzkabinett remained organizationally intact after the war.

The current holdings comprise over 500,000 original objects as well as more than 300,000 plaster casts and banknote duplicates. The ancient holdings include about 102,000 Greek and roughly 50,000 Roman coins; outstanding pieces include, among others, the Demareteion and the unique Attic decadrachm. The medieval and Byzantine collection up to around 1500 comprises roughly 66,000 items. Post-medieval global coinages reaching into the modern era total about 103,000 pieces; in addition there are approximately 30,000 Oriental and Asian coins. The medal collection, with a focus on portrait medals of the Renaissance, comprises about 32,000 medals and models. Further holdings include treasure finds, banknotes and securities, metal emergency money, jetons, counterfeit coins, seals, pre-monetary forms of money, weights, ingots and an extensive number of minting tools.

Since 2007 an interactive catalogue has been available online; it records the holdings in a standardized manner with images and text and had grown to over 55,000 objects by autumn 2023. The Münzkabinett participates in the nationwide German digitization project NUMiD, which has been funded since 2017 and networks the holdings of numerous university coin collections. A spectacular incident in recent history was the theft of the Canadian Big Maple Leaf on 27 March 2017: the 100-kg gold coin of almost pure gold, on long-term loan since 2010, was stolen.