Twelve years of cataloguing, five editors, one quiet office above a violin-maker.

How it started.

The atlas's founding incident is well documented in the inaugural editorial (Issue One, 22 September 2014). Hamza al-Marsafi had spent eleven years at the Greco-Roman Museum's coin section in Alexandria, including six as the cataloguer of the museum's Roman provincial holdings. In late 2013 he was asked by a private collector to verify the attribution of a Roman tetradrachm of Hadrian alexandrian mint that the collector had bought at auction. Hamza identified the specimen as a modern cast forgery within twenty minutes; the collector then asked him where he could find an authenticated specimen for purchase, and Hamza realised the standard references — Burnett-Amandry-Ripollès, the British Museum catalogue, the older Geissen-Weber — were all twenty to forty years out of date in their photographic plates and that no contemporary working reference existed for the Roman provincial Egyptian series.

The atlas's first issue covered fifty-six Roman provincial coins. The print run was a hundred copies, photocopied and folded at the editorial office above the violin-maker on Sharia Sultan Hussein, posted to a list of forty-three subscribers Hamza had assembled at university numismatics seminars over the previous six months. Issue Two added the first Ptolemaic specimens. By the end of the first year the catalogue numbered three hundred and seventy-two specimens. The cooperative was formally incorporated as Suez Canal Editorial S.A.E. in March 2015.

The five editors.

Hamza al-Marsafi — founder and editor-in-chief. Born Alexandria 1972. PhD in classical archaeology, University of Alexandria, 2008. Eleven years at the Greco-Roman Museum coin section. Subject specialisms: Roman provincial Egyptian coinage, Hadrianic and Antonine emissions, modern forgery detection. Reads classical Greek, Latin, French and Arabic. Signs roughly thirty percent of the atlas's attribution notes personally.

Soraya el-Mursi — Ptolemaic specialist, deputy editor. Born Cairo 1981. PhD American University in Cairo, 2014, thesis on the Alexandria mint output under Ptolemy II and III. Joined the atlas in 2016. Maintains the Svoronos cross-reference table and the mint-mark concordance. Signs roughly forty percent of the Ptolemaic attributions; the remainder are shared with Hamza.

Karim Bayoumi — Byzantine and Fatimid specialist. Born Mansoura 1978. MA Cairo University 2003, then ten years at the National Library and Archives manuscript section before joining the atlas full-time in 2018. Reads classical Arabic, Coptic and conversational Greek. The atlas's Fatimid section in particular reflects his long working knowledge of the Lane-Poole-Balog corpus.

Anneke Vermeulen — scarab and stamp-seal specialist. Dutch national, born Utrecht 1976. PhD Leiden 2010, thesis on Tufnell-Mlinar scarab typology revisited. Has lived in Ismailia since 2019 when she married a Suez Canal pilot. Joined the atlas part-time in 2020 and full-time in 2022. Writes most of the Pharaonic section.

Mostafa Selim — photographic and digital editor. Born Ismailia 1989. Trained as a documentary photographer at the Faculty of Applied Arts, Cairo, 2007–11. Joined the atlas in 2015 as a junior assistant and is now responsible for the photographic plates, the colour calibration system, the digital catalogue infrastructure and the twice-yearly XML export. Maintains the atlas's website and the subscriber list.

The cooperative's part-time administrator, Salma Mansour, has handled subscriptions, accounting, postal mail and the office Sunday-Tuesday-Thursday opening hours since 2017. She does not write for the atlas but is responsible for every word of the financial transparency note that runs in the December issue.

Editorial governance.

The cooperative is governed by a five-member editorial board (the five editors above) with the administrator attending without voting rights. The board meets monthly at the office. Major editorial decisions — admission of a specimen with a disputed attribution, addition of a new period or material category, change to the methodology document, acceptance of a new editor — require a four-of-five board vote. Routine attribution sign-offs and catalogue additions are by the two editors specified in the methodology. The editor-in-chief role rotates among the four senior editors on a four-year cycle; Hamza holds the current term until December 2027.

Funding and editorial independence.

Reader subscriptions provided approximately sixty-five percent of the atlas's revenue in 2025. The Cairo Numismatic Society's annual grant — a fixed sum of one hundred and twenty thousand Egyptian pounds, recurring since 2017 under a renewable five-year agreement — provided twenty-eight percent. The remaining seven percent came from occasional university teaching contracts that Soraya and Karim hold at the American University in Cairo and at Mansoura University respectively, both of which are declared and logged in the annual transparency note. No dealer, auction house, marketplace or private collector has funded the atlas at any point in its twelve-year history. Four sponsorship approaches from auction houses have been declined since 2014 and are logged with the date of approach and the dealer name in the annual register.

The Cairo Numismatic Society grant carries no editorial conditions and is paid in a single annual transfer in January. The grant agreement, available on request to academic readers, explicitly forbids the Society from exercising editorial direction over the atlas's content. The Society's annual report (separate from the atlas's) describes the grant as part of the Society's broader public-scholarship programme; the two publications maintain editorial walls and the Society's officers do not see the atlas's content before publication.

Methodology in summary.

Every specimen in the catalogue passes through the four-stage process described on the services page — photographic plate, reference attribution, provenance trace, two-editor sign-off. The full methodology document is eleven pages, last revised March 2026, and is downloadable openly. Corrections to published catalogue entries are issued in writing within thirty days of confirmation; one hundred and forty-three corrections have been published since 2014, each in the corrections register and in the next monthly bulletin. The bulletin sends a separate three-line correction notice to all subscribers when the correction concerns an attribution that has been used in a publication or seminar.

What we publish — and what we do not.

We publish the catalogue specimens with their reference attributions, the photographic plates, the provenance lines, the corrections register, the methodology document, the monthly bulletin, the twice-yearly XML export, the annual financial transparency note and the editorial board minutes in summary form. We publish the identities of editors and the funding sources openly. We do not publish private collectors' names without consent; we do not publish auction-house lot prices; we do not publish specimens whose provenance is undocumented in the post-1970 window, regardless of their numismatic interest. We do not publish images supplied to us by dealers that we have not seen in person and weighed and measured ourselves.

The Ismailia office.

The office is the second floor of the 1920s Suez Canal Authority residence at 9 Sharia Sultan Hussein, on the El-Salam side of the canal. The downstairs neighbour — the violin-maker Tareq Habib — has occupied the ground floor since the early 1990s; the sound of bow rosin and Cremonese-style chisel work carries faintly to the upper floor and is part of the working atmosphere. The office consists of three rooms: a reception room where visitors are received, a working room with the photographic light table and the two-editor desk, and the library room with the reference works and the run of the Cahier numismatique. A small kitchen at the back makes the tea that Salma serves to visitors. Visitor hours are Sunday, Tuesday and Thursday afternoons from 14:00 to 17:00 Cairo time, by appointment for academic visitors and uncommitted for short visits from numismatic-curious readers.

Correspondence and how to find the office.

The office is reached by writing to [email protected] or telephoning Salma on +20 64 3940 271 during office hours. Sharia Sultan Hussein is the street that runs east from the Ismailia roundabout toward the Sweet Water Canal; the building is the corner property at the El-Salam intersection, recognisable by the violin-maker's hand-painted sign on the ground floor. Postal correspondence to the same address; mark the envelope "atlas editorial office, second floor" so the building's neighbours know where to direct it.