Country/Sub-Section/Issuer/Ruling Authority

Hi guys,
to be honest, I lost track a bit. Maybe I just missed it in the numista documentation or joined numista too late to get the full discussion. Are the criteria for the different catalog sections (see title) explained somewhere? What would be in Germany for example an issuer, what would be a ruling authority? Is a subsection of a country automatically a new issuer? Is it possible that a subsection of a country is another country (e.g. German Democratic Republic)? What qualifies an issuer to be one? When is a political change of a country a new issuer? When is an issuer a country? What qualifies a country? What is a ruling authority in a country without monarchy?
Can maybe someone enlighten me a bit or even better: Write down clear definitions and put it in numisdoc?
Thanks!
Carsten

Hey,

I am probably the most qualified to answer. Although, you probably won't be really happy with the answers.

First a little history. Most comprehensive catalogue for overall view of worlds coinage in last few centuries was Krause, so Numista based it's original structure on it. This was both good and bad for several reasons. While Numista had a structure which was familiar to collectors, it also came with errors Krause had. We have filtered some out, but some are still out there.

In general, each modern country is considered and counted as a country on Numista. Then, similarly to Krause, some countries have subsections - that is everything what is under them, either in collapsible or not collapsible menus. Subsections are just terminus technicus to describe what you can see in the country list, and they are not counted in any way.

Problem is with colonies, where you cannot decide whether it is independent or not.

Another problem are countries which somehow divided among more successors, like Yugoslavia. As Yugoslavia cannot be put under any of its successors, it stands alone in the country list.

There are also uncharted waters of coinage which Krause never listed. These usually medieval countries cannot be listed under modern countries they have nothing in common with. Example of these are Crusaders states, many of these would be now listed under Turkey, probably one of the least crusader-like state today (no offense meant).


​​So, as you can see, there is a ton of problems with this. We have filtered ancient countries, micronations and current non-UN territories out, but that only helps a little.

Now on Issuers - this is primary counter of actual countries in any age of human coinage. Basically it is independent (independent enough to have its own coins) authority that uses or used coins on its territorry. From smallest Greek city states or any medieval duchies and kingdoms to largest empires or as you noted, German Democratic Republic, everything is an issuer. There is sometimes problem where to place some of these, but that is not that common.

Ruling authorities are fairly new way how to sort individual coins within one specific issuer. Mostly, these are men and women that ruled given issuer, and coins are assigned to them. Once done, you will be able to sort UK coins by different kings and queens. There are also rolling authorities known as periods. Usually it is the republic in most cases, or some form of dictatorship. While this makes little sense in case like Slovenia - there is just one ruling authority, it makes much more sense in France, where you can now see coins sorted by kings and different republican periods.

Just in case demonstration: If you get coin from GDR, you will have one issuers counted, and one country - Germany. If you add one coin from Saxony and one from Bavaria, you will get two more issuers, but you will still have just one country counted. In some cases, like Gabon, there is no difference between country and issuer, if you get coin from it, you will have both added into your statistics.

If you have any more questions, feel free to ask.

Thanks gor this extensive answer. Especially the issuer-thing I saw different before, but makes now sense to me.

What happens, if you add a coin of a monetary union? Can you get more than one country by adding just one coin?

The background of my original question is, that I think about how to add ruling authorities to the section Germany 1871-1948 and to - at the same time - structure this in a more transparent way. I have a Kaiser and different Kings in the individual states (e.g. Bayern) with their counterfeits on the coins. For this it would somehow need a second layer of ruling authorities... and at the same time, adding "eras" like the Weimar Republic or the Nazi Era as ruling authority does also not really feel right...

No, monetary unions cannot count as more countries sadly.

And yes, some periods may feel wrong, but that is sad reality.

Central African States (BEAC) and Western African States (BCEAO), which are a sort of unions, count as countries:
https://en.numista.com/catalogue/beac-1.html
https://en.numista.com/catalogue/bceao-1.html

My impression is that monetary unions with unified coinage (so, e.g., BEAC, but not the Eurozone) are always supposed* to be separate issuers (at least, when they're not obvious successors and/or predecessors of one of the members), and whether they are separate countries depends on geography.

In particular, there's a bunch of "joint coinage" German state issuers that are basically monetary unions; obviously, they're still German states, so go into that category.

As for the separate issues of states under the German Empire, the current Numista position is to lump them together with pre-unification issues of those same states, though obviously under a different currency (except in Mecklenburg, which jumped the gun with its 1872 pfennigs). I'm not sure how it would count in terms of ruling authority.


*) come to think of it, no idea why, say, this coin isn't a separate issuer

About the Issuer subject:

For instance: Why Ceylon and Sri Lanka are different issuers while Swaziland and Eswatini are the same?

Or why there is French Cameroon but not French Algeria.

Would be nice to have a single rule, and stick to that.

I'm curious about it too. Some countries I see why; eg. Germany is so split up, but other issueres which incompasses the current country's territory, more or less, is split up. Other issueres are split up in monarchy period or in different republic/ruling names periods and Republic Period: See China/Netherlands/Congo/Vietnam/Iran/Iraq vs. Suriname/Fiji/Trinidad and Tobago/Cyprus/Malta.

I see a kind of pattern with (former) colonies less likely to be split up between monarchy and republic time, but it could be nice with some uniformity, or some basic logic, where the "rules" are more... Tranparant, I guess?

And of course I understand why some of the examples should be split up, eg. parts of the China issuere I understand why they aren't all under China.

I'm in no way a computer teck-ish person, but is it in part because the map need different issueres to fill out corectly territory wise?

Best
Jamtrup

Hi

I just cannot resist to ask admins to add "Murska Republika" to one of the states. Although at the time the Hungarian currency was widely used.

It was what it was: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Republic_of_Prekmurje

LP