Following in no particular order are informal commentaries and reviews of numismatic works which do not appear in public domain web pages. Often they originated as postings in duscussion groups or private emails, and are not as rigorous as a scholarly review might be, but still contain useful insights on the works covered. If you know of any additional online reviews of these works, please CONTACT ME.
Terrien de Lacouperie, Albert: Catalogue of Chinese Coins from the VIIth Cent BC to AD 621 (British Museum Catalogue)
Lacouperie's catalog of ancient Chinese coins was a very good work
for its time -- the first extensive catalog in a western language of
Chinese knife, spade and early round coins. Only a few of the coins
listed in this catalog were actually in the British Museum, and some
of those were obvious fakes. Lacouperie identified the fakes when he
recognized them -- quite an innovation in those days. Most of the
coins listed in the catalog are taken from Chinese works, especially
Li Tso-hsien's "Ku Ch'uan Hui," which Lacouperie abbreviates K.C.H.
By including the listings in Chinese works, Lacouperie was the first
westerner to attempt a corpus of all ancient Chinese coins.
Many of the readings of the inscriptions on the knife and spade coins
are wrong, but Lacouperie was only following the readings in Chinese
works. Lacouperie's most original contribution, however, is his
theory of Chinese monetary unions. In classical Greek coinage, it is
well established that certain Greek city states formed unions and
issued coins in the same standards. Lacouperie thought he saw the
same situation in Chou dynasty coinage and devotes some space to the
subject in the catalog. As far as I know, no one today believes that
such monetary unions existed in ancient China. Lacouperie was a
believer in the idea of diffusion, which theorizes that all
civilizations developed from an original civilization in Mesopotamia.
One of Lacouperie's other works attempts to show that Chinese
characters are actually derived from Egyptian hieroglyphs or
Mesopotamian cuneiform writing. Such ideas were widely held in the
19th century -- supporting the idea of western superiority. In the
20th century, diffusionism was discarded, but now it seems a bit too
hastily. For example, it is now pretty well accepted that the ancient
Chinese chariot was a direct import from the middle east. And there
is the question of how Chinese writing suddenly appeared in the late
Shang as a fully developed system, with no apparent precursors.
I read somewhere that there was a furor over the appointment of
Lacouperie, a Frenchman, to compile the British Museum's Chinese
catalog. If I remember correctly, the decision was made, in part,
because Lacouperie was in need of an income, and so he was hired to
do the job. The catalog does have a handy collection of historical
notes about ancient Chinese cities, something not found in western
works until Arthur Coole's series of catalogs (Encyclopedia of
Chinese Coins, volumes 2-6). Unfortunately Coole chose to make his
own reading of the inscriptions on Chinese spade coins, and he was
often wrong. His bits of geographical information, from what he
called the DG (Geographical Dictionary - a dictionary of historical
geography published in the 1930's), are mostly useless because he had
the wrong reading of the inscription, or because he chose the wrong
place name in the geographical dictionary, or because he did not
understand the dictionary's passage and mistranslated the
information. As a result, he has attributed some spade coins to places
which were not part of ancient China (the far south and Sinkiang) or
which did not come into existence till centuries later. Lacouperie's
catalog is also useful for his glossary of terms. Though Lacouperie's
British Museum catalog has been largely superceeded by later works --
Coole's Encyclopedia in English and various recent works in Chinese --
it is still useful, particularly for identifying ancient Chinese
coins in old auction catalogs which use the BMC as a reference. Source: Bruce W. Smith: Fri Dec 12, 2008: Posting to Ancient_Chinese_Coins@yahoogroups.com