For twelve years our five-person editorial desk has documented the surviving Egyptian coinage and seal-impressions from the Late Period through the Fatimid caliphate — currently 2 847 inventoried specimens, each photographed obverse and reverse, weighed and measured against a calibrated reference, and provided with an attribution note that follows the Roman Imperial Coinage and Svoronos numbering conventions. The atlas is published openly, free to read; the editorial work is sustained by reader subscriptions and a single annual grant from the Cairo Numismatic Society.
Sycamore Numismatic Atlas is an independent scholarly publication. We do not sell coins, do not value coins for private owners outside the formal request channel, do not run a marketplace and do not host listings. Our function is documentary: we record specimens currently known to the discipline, we attribute them against the accepted reference catalogues (Svoronos for the Ptolemaic, Burnett-Amandry-Ripollès for the Roman Provincial, Goodacre for the Byzantine, Lane-Poole for the Fatimid, Petrie and Tufnell for the Pharaonic scarabs), we publish the attribution rationale openly, and we maintain a corrections register that runs back to the atlas's first issue in September 2014.
The atlas is read by university numismatics seminars in Cairo, Alexandria, Mansoura, Berlin, Leiden, Oxford and at the École Française du Caire; by the Egyptian Antiquities Authority's coin section in Tahrir; by a small number of serious private collectors who use the atlas as a reference rather than for valuation; and by a wider readership of about two thousand interested non-specialists who subscribe to the monthly newsletter.
SY-2026-0184
Four hundred and eighty-three Ptolemaic tetradrachms documented, with Svoronos numbers, weight and die-axis data, and a discussion of the mint marks at Alexandria, Cyprus and Phoenicia.
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SY-2025-1108
The largest section of the atlas: six hundred and thirty-one specimens covering Augustus to Diocletian's reform, with full Burnett-Amandry-Ripollès attribution.
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SY-2023-0612
Five hundred and ninety-six scarab and stamp seals catalogued by Tufnell-Mlinar typology, with discussion of forged versus authenticated provenance.
Open the file →Every specimen entered into the atlas passes through four documented stages before a catalogue number is assigned. The methodology document — eleven pages, last revised March 2026 — describes each stage in detail; the summary below is the working version that hangs on the editorial-room wall.
Obverse and reverse photographed on a calibrated colour reference under the same lighting conditions used since 2014. Weight to 0.01 g on an Adam Equipment NBL-214i, diameter to 0.1 mm at four cardinal axes. Die axis recorded against a magnetic alignment jig.
The specimen is compared against the standard reference catalogue for its period — Svoronos for Ptolemaic, BMC for Roman provincial, Burnett-Amandry-Ripollès for the imperial provincial, Goodacre for Byzantine Egypt, Lane-Poole-Balog for Fatimid, Tufnell-Mlinar for scarabs. The reference number is recorded in full, including the variant suffix.
Every specimen is provided with a documented provenance line — at minimum the dealer or institution from which it came, ideally back further. Specimens without a documentable pre-1970 provenance are clearly flagged; specimens with documented illicit-trade context are not entered into the atlas at all.
The attribution note is signed by two editors, one of whom is the period specialist. Disputed attributions are flagged as such in the catalogue with the rationale of each editor printed openly. Twelve specimens currently carry a flagged-disputed status.
The atlas is published from Ismailia, the administrative capital of the Suez Canal Zone, for a structural reason. Ismailia is two and a half hours by road from the Cairo collections, one and a half from the Alexandria Greco-Roman Museum, and is the closest base from which the Sinai survey expeditions of the 1990s — which produced much of the documented Late Roman material now in private hands — were coordinated. Three of the atlas's five editors live in Ismailia for personal reasons unconnected to numismatics; the city's quiet, the absence of the Cairo distraction, and the proximity to both the Egyptian and Mediterranean numismatic worlds made the founding choice natural in 2014.
The editorial office occupies the second floor of a 1920s Suez Canal Authority residence at 9 Sharia Sultan Hussein, on the El-Salam side of the canal. The downstairs neighbour is a working violin-maker whose family business has occupied the ground floor since 1934. The atlas's working library — approximately twelve hundred volumes of numismatic reference works, plus the run of the Cahier numismatique back to 1948 — sits in the rear room with the photographic light table. Visitors are welcome by appointment on Sunday, Tuesday and Thursday afternoons.
The atlas's full editorial team and the cooperative's funding structure are described on the about page. The methodology document, downloadable openly, is on the services page. Reader subscriptions are described on the pricing page and reach the atlas at [email protected].
The atlas does not provide commercial valuations and does not act as an appraiser. We can identify a specimen for you against the standard reference catalogues — what it is, who minted it, when, and roughly how rare the issue is — for which there is a formal request channel described on the services page. Market value is the province of auction houses and licensed dealers; we direct private owners to those channels.
Because the atlas's commercial independence from the dealer trade is what makes the attribution notes worth reading. The Cairo Numismatic Society grant covers about twenty-eight percent of our annual costs; reader subscriptions cover the rest. We have refused four sponsorship approaches from dealer houses since 2014; each refusal is documented in the corresponding year's transparency note.
Two things mainly. First, the open photographic plates with the calibrated colour reference — most published numismatic catalogues use uncalibrated photography that complicates die comparison. Second, the consolidated Egyptian coinage corpus across the periods (Late Period, Ptolemaic, Roman, Byzantine, Umayyad, Fatimid) in a single attribution framework; the standard references are period-siloed and cross-period comparisons are difficult.
New entries enter the catalogue continuously as they are documented; the monthly newsletter summarises the additions of the previous month. The full catalogue export is published twice yearly — January and July — in machine-readable XML for academic use. The current catalogue export, dated January 2026, sits at 2 847 specimens.
Reader subscriptions cover approximately sixty-five percent of the editorial costs; the Cairo Numismatic Society annual grant covers twenty-eight percent; the remaining seven percent comes from occasional university teaching contracts that the senior editors carry alongside the atlas. No dealer, auction house or private collector provides funding. The editorial chain is described in detail on the about page and in the methodology document.
Subscribers receive a monthly bulletin emailed on the first Sunday of every month — sixteen to twenty-four pages of new catalogue entries, the running corrections register, occasional brief essays on a specimen or hoard, and the dates of any upcoming editorial visits to overseas collections. Subscription is by household at three tiers; the lowest is twelve euros a year.